there are some surprises in there, such as a delayed requirement for HDCP
For those who (like me) did not know what HDCP is: it stands for "High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection", and its purpose is to prevent the PC's owner from using the PC to copy certain media. Fuller and more precise information can be found here. It's basically a component that you pay for, that reduces the capability of your computer. I wonder which consumers are demanding something like that...
Is this intended as a favorable or pejorative description of John Gilmore?
If John Gilmore is a rabble-rouser, then in my opinion the USA needs more rabble-rousers. If we had 100 million of them, the politicians would never have dared take away all our rights.
if you force everyone to take the wine, some of them throw it on the floor and fill the glass up with water.
After paying Microsoft for the Windows XP that they delete.
Seriously, this is the real problem. As long as Microsoft gets paid for Windows on every PC shipped, regardless of whether that PC will actually run Windows or not, Microsoft wins. It will use the money that you paid it to, among other things, buy more anti-Linux "studies".
That's one of the reasons that the Lenovo decision is a genuine victory for Microsoft and a real defeat for Linux. Let's face the facts and not pretend otherwise.
To answer that, you have to ask "Cui bono?", and the answer to that is "Microsoft". So the most logical explanation is that Microsoft has offered Lenovo extra discounts if Lenovo agrees to discourage Linux use; or has threatened less-favorable terms if Lenovo does not agree to discourage Linux use.
IBM had the clout to resist Microsoft - there are still some big corporations that regard IBM as the gold standard. Lenovo hasn't. So it would come down to ethics and concern for the interests of the customer, vs next quarter's bottom line. We all know what priorities those have in today's corporate America.
But don't waste time on bugs that only affect legacy hardware.
It would also be a good idea for some effort to be spent on consolidating, corrrecting, and updating the various lists of "Hardware supported by Linux". There are lots of such lists on the web, for example:
- not to mention the distro-specific compatible hardware lists maintained for Redhat, Mandriva,Suse, and others.
We need one correct, maintained list, not dozens of nearly-correct, usually out-of-date lists. And it seems to me that the list should depend only on the kernel version, not on the distro.
You missed an important point
on
Explorer Destroyer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
..another browser monoculture.
Wrong. A user who comes to the site with Opera or Mozilla or Safari, or in fact any W3C-compliant browser, will not see the message (unless browser options are set to lie about its identity, which is probably not a smart thing to do anyway). This initiative is not intended to lead to a browser monoculture.
Having said that, I would have preferred to see a script which detects grossly non-standard behavior, rather than a specific browser. I'd have no problem with MSIE being dominant if it respected agreed W3C standards.
There are plenty of banks whose websites conform to W3C standards, and which consequently are usable with Firefox. I don't have any problem with my on-line banking (with Firefox, of course). Maybe you should change to a better bank? If your bank is backward in the way you describe, it probably has other problems which are not yet apparent to you.
Note: I know that Kerry and Bush are equally bad choices
They're both pretty bad, but not equally bad. Bush obviously has no respect for the ideals on which America was founded - his attitude to the Bill of Rights is that it's a bunch of obstacles to be worked around (e.g. when he wants to jail people without due process). I've seen no indication that Kerry is as bad as that.
The "ideal" candidate is never on the ballot. But America still has a very important choice to make.
The article seems confused. Microsoft is advised to develop Linux apps and "in particular" go for the Blackberry.
But Research In Motion's Blackberry is not any kind of free-software platform. It runs yet another proprietary operating system, requiring (at the moment) proprietary development tools. It has nothing to offer over Windows CE (except possibly quality of implementation).
I hear them from the Bush administration almost daily and corporate america is getting a lot more brazen.
Politicians (especially the ones in power, regardless of party) always tend to lie. And salespeople have never been noted for truthfulness.
What has changed, gradually, over a couple of decades, is that the media no longer provide a check on politicians and corporate liars.
The purpose of the media used to be to provide information and critical comment. That's changed. A newspaper or a TV network makes more money if it's operated primarily as an entertainment. That means: nothing that requires the consumer to think, because a lot of people don't like to think. Not too many boring facts, either (unless they're sensational).
Don't be too hard on Gates. There will always be people whose goal in life is to make more money, by any means that works. The problem is that our society has lost the checks and balances that used to constrain people like him.
FAQs have been around since the beginning of the web & most of them still suck
Wrong on 2 counts. FAQs have been around twice as long as the web. They have been around at least since the early days of Usenet.
The ones that are actually what they claim to be - a list of the most-frequently asked questions, with answers - are very useful. The purpose of a FAQ is not to answer every possible question, it is not to be an introductory guide, it is not to replace "Howto" documents... it is to collect the most frequently-asked questions about the subject, with answers that are useful to the people likely to ask those questions.
A majority of FAQs, and nearly all the ones that originated in Usenet newsgroups, still do that. And are useful.
Is it just my imagination, or are/. editors selecting more and more trollish/flamebait articles for publication, and rejecting more and more interesting/timely ones?
The title of the article is misleading because, of course, the job of this guy is to coordinate Microsoft's anti-Linux strategy. Back in the old days, when companies used to consider their customers' needs, a title like this used to mean someone who worked on interoperability. For example, I worked for Digital long ago, and their "IBM strategist" pushed products like VAX-to-IBM connectivity as well as researching competitive factors.
Microsoft's anti-Linux strategist, on the contrary, will probably be recommending more changes to Microsoft networking to put more roadblocks in the way of the Samba people, more file-format changes to Word and Excel to screw OpenOffice, and stuff like that. It's rumored that Microsoft has in the past hired actors to behave like really obnoxious Linux fanboys at trade shows, damaging Linux's image - if it's true, no doubt he'll have a hand in that, too.
If they think this concept will make them more money than it cost to research and implement, you can bet your arse they'll implement it. They really don't care about interoperability either.
I think they've shown they care about interoperability very much: they don't like it, and will do whatever they can to disrupt it. That's shown by, for example, the changes they've made to filesharing to make life difficult for the Samba people; the fact that they not only don't document file formats for key applications, but change them slightly with every new application version; and now Sender-ID, where (apparently by order from BG personally) they insisted on licensing terms calculated to be incompatible with some of the most important free software licenses, including the GPL.
I think you're wrong about the Microsoft decision process - "If...this concept will make them more money...". Sender-ID would not make them any money; I very much doubt that anyone is going to migrate from Linux to Windows just to get the supposed benefits of Sender-ID! That's not what its for. Breaking interoperability is a corporate goal for Microsoft, because interoperability allows competitors to survive.
Re:The thinner, the better
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The thinnest language manual I've ever used was the BCPL manual, which described the full language and its library (with examples) in an A4-size manual less than 2mm thick. This was in the mid-1970s. Developed by Martin Richards at Cambridge (not sure when - 1970??), the language became popular at CERN and was used at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and elsewhere, and influenced the design of C.
Novell's stock is looking pretty attractive at $5.80
The main effect of the rise of a competitive OS will be to lower prices to users, as Microsoft loses its ability to charge monopoly rents. In other words, the businesses that will really gain are computer software users, not computer software sellers or distributors.
The best way to profit from this trend in the stock market, therefore, is to bet against high profit growth of companies like Microsoft. Microsoft currently trades at a P/E multiple of 36. The long-term historical average for stock P/E ratios is in the range 14 to 17, so Microsoft's current price builds in the assumption that their profits will continue to grow exponentially, as they have in the past. If (like me) you think it unlikely that Microsoft will be able to double its profits anytime soon, then you could sell MSFT short. I sold at a price of $28.5 and it closed on Friday at $27.11, so the trade is doing OK so far.
If you do this, you need to control your risk, of course. Check the price every day, and if it closes above $29, accept that I was wrong and close the position.
Otherwise, there's a good chance that it will go down to $20 or less, so you're risking $1.89/share for a very good chance of gaining $7/share or more. Those are good odds.
The corporate world isn't geeks and freaks installing linux. You buy a whole system that includes hardware, software, and support. When the machine breaks, you don't start playing with.conf files and testing it, you call the manufacturer and they fix it
This is simply not true. I've spent the last 8 years working for big multinational banks. They all have internal support organizations. When something breaks, you call the tech support hotline, which is usually to the bank's internal support group. In a few banks, this function is contracted out to a company like EDS, whose people would be on-site. Nobody ever calls the manufacturer or the software publisher. I've watched the tech support guys fix problems, and they don't call the manufacturer or software publisher either, they fix the problem themselves (which might sometimes involve replacing the machine or reinstalling the software).
As the Debian statement says, We are also concerned that no company should be permitted intellectual
property rights (IPR) over core Internet infrastructure.
Seems obvious to me. Why isn't it obvious to the IETF?
Debian again: We believe
the IETF needs to revamp its IPR policies to ensure that the core Internet infrastructure remain unencumbered.
Right on.
A company like Microsoft has no respect for the rights of others, no respect for ethics, no respect for the ideals of the people who built the Internet infrastructure for our benefit. I agree with Debian that no company should be permitted IP rights over core Internet infrastructure. But especially not a predatory company like Microsoft.
How did this blatant, loud, nonsense get modded up?
The post which you are complaining about points out that in order to receive certain services from the USPTO, you have to be running Microsoft Internet Explorer on a Microsoft operating system.
Now, the USPTO's services are funded by taxpayers, and it seems unreasonable to me that it should discriminate in favor of Microsoft customers, or give Microsoft a marketplace advantage.
Whether all the assertions in the post you are complaining about are precisely accurate or not is beside the point. If the main statement - i.e. that there are USPTO "public" services which you can't use unless you pay Microsoft - is correct, then this is an appalling disgrace, and a certain amount of hyperbole is understandable. You didn't provide any evidence to challenge the main point.
You can't define a "standard" by what one program does, because that program will change. IE 6 has different bugs from IE 5, and IE 7 will have different bugs from IE 6.
Adhering to the published W3C standards is the only way to go.
Personally, I find very, very few sites are written exclusively for IE, apart from microsoft.com sites. Most companies have more sense than to alienate 15% of their customers.
W3Schools [...] is not indicative of average users....My non-techy websites get about 7% Firefox, and about another 3% of Mozilla/Netscape 6/7 users.
How many hits are your statistics based on? Unless you tell us that, we can't know whether your numbers are significantly different from the W3Schools numbers or not.
Re:Yet another library for an obsolete language
on
APR 1.0.0 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunatly g++ is not a good c++ compiler
I disagree; I think the current version is a fine C++ compiler. What's wrong with it?
Yet another library for an obsolete language
on
APR 1.0.0 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I know I'll get flamed/modded down for this, but it needs to be said: there is no reason for new apps to be written in C. C++ can do everything that C can do, just as efficiently; it's easier to read, which means a code review is more effective; language features and the STL reduce the need for explicit dynamic memory allocation, which is a source of bugs in C; the language is a better match than C to modern, object-oriented methods of analysis and design; - I could go on, but shouldn't need to.
That's not quite the situation. It works for Windows servers; as long as those servers aren't in domains which use name servers running on Windows 2000. I doubt that many name servers run on any version of Windows, except in intranets which aren't relevant here. That's probably why such a basic bug in Microsoft's implementation of DNS has remained for >4 years.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who (like me) did not know what HDCP is: it stands for "High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection", and its purpose is to prevent the PC's owner from using the PC to copy certain media. Fuller and more precise information can be found here. It's basically a component that you pay for, that reduces the capability of your computer. I wonder which consumers are demanding something like that ...
Is this intended as a favorable or pejorative description of John Gilmore?
If John Gilmore is a rabble-rouser, then in my opinion the USA needs more rabble-rousers. If we had 100 million of them, the politicians would never have dared take away all our rights.
After paying Microsoft for the Windows XP that they delete.
Seriously, this is the real problem. As long as Microsoft gets paid for Windows on every PC shipped, regardless of whether that PC will actually run Windows or not, Microsoft wins. It will use the money that you paid it to, among other things, buy more anti-Linux "studies".
That's one of the reasons that the Lenovo decision is a genuine victory for Microsoft and a real defeat for Linux. Let's face the facts and not pretend otherwise.
To answer that, you have to ask "Cui bono?", and the answer to that is "Microsoft". So the most logical explanation is that Microsoft has offered Lenovo extra discounts if Lenovo agrees to discourage Linux use; or has threatened less-favorable terms if Lenovo does not agree to discourage Linux use.
IBM had the clout to resist Microsoft - there are still some big corporations that regard IBM as the gold standard. Lenovo hasn't. So it would come down to ethics and concern for the interests of the customer, vs next quarter's bottom line. We all know what priorities those have in today's corporate America.
Yes, it's a good idea.
But don't waste time on bugs that only affect legacy hardware.
It would also be a good idea for some effort to be spent on consolidating, corrrecting, and updating the various lists of "Hardware supported by Linux". There are lots of such lists on the web, for example:
- not to mention the distro-specific compatible hardware lists maintained for Redhat, Mandriva,Suse, and others.
We need one correct, maintained list, not dozens of nearly-correct, usually out-of-date lists. And it seems to me that the list should depend only on the kernel version, not on the distro.
Wrong. A user who comes to the site with Opera or Mozilla or Safari, or in fact any W3C-compliant browser, will not see the message (unless browser options are set to lie about its identity, which is probably not a smart thing to do anyway). This initiative is not intended to lead to a browser monoculture.
Having said that, I would have preferred to see a script which detects grossly non-standard behavior, rather than a specific browser. I'd have no problem with MSIE being dominant if it respected agreed W3C standards.
There are plenty of banks whose websites conform to W3C standards, and which consequently are usable with Firefox. I don't have any problem with my on-line banking (with Firefox, of course). Maybe you should change to a better bank? If your bank is backward in the way you describe, it probably has other problems which are not yet apparent to you.
Which of the following wastes more of your time:
Personally, I have a pretty good spam filter so it's #2 by a large margin.
They have a far worse safety record than any commercial passenger jet.
Shuttle: 2 flights lost with all crew in 20 years. And there weren't that many shuttle flights per year.
Passenger jet: take the Concorde as an example. There was approximately one Concorde flight every day for 30 years. They lost one flight in that time.
Other passenger jets have even better safety records. How many Boeing or Airbus flights are there per day? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
They're both pretty bad, but not equally bad. Bush obviously has no respect for the ideals on which America was founded - his attitude to the Bill of Rights is that it's a bunch of obstacles to be worked around (e.g. when he wants to jail people without due process). I've seen no indication that Kerry is as bad as that.
The "ideal" candidate is never on the ballot. But America still has a very important choice to make.
But Research In Motion's Blackberry is not any kind of free-software platform. It runs yet another proprietary operating system, requiring (at the moment) proprietary development tools. It has nothing to offer over Windows CE (except possibly quality of implementation).
Politicians (especially the ones in power, regardless of party) always tend to lie. And salespeople have never been noted for truthfulness.
What has changed, gradually, over a couple of decades, is that the media no longer provide a check on politicians and corporate liars.
The purpose of the media used to be to provide information and critical comment. That's changed. A newspaper or a TV network makes more money if it's operated primarily as an entertainment. That means: nothing that requires the consumer to think, because a lot of people don't like to think. Not too many boring facts, either (unless they're sensational).
Don't be too hard on Gates. There will always be people whose goal in life is to make more money, by any means that works. The problem is that our society has lost the checks and balances that used to constrain people like him.
Wrong on 2 counts. FAQs have been around twice as long as the web. They have been around at least since the early days of Usenet.
The ones that are actually what they claim to be - a list of the most-frequently asked questions, with answers - are very useful. The purpose of a FAQ is not to answer every possible question, it is not to be an introductory guide, it is not to replace "Howto" documents... it is to collect the most frequently-asked questions about the subject, with answers that are useful to the people likely to ask those questions.
A majority of FAQs, and nearly all the ones that originated in Usenet newsgroups, still do that. And are useful.
Is it just my imagination, or are /. editors selecting more and more trollish/flamebait articles for publication, and rejecting more and more interesting/timely ones?
Microsoft's anti-Linux strategist, on the contrary, will probably be recommending more changes to Microsoft networking to put more roadblocks in the way of the Samba people, more file-format changes to Word and Excel to screw OpenOffice, and stuff like that. It's rumored that Microsoft has in the past hired actors to behave like really obnoxious Linux fanboys at trade shows, damaging Linux's image - if it's true, no doubt he'll have a hand in that, too.
I think they've shown they care about interoperability very much: they don't like it, and will do whatever they can to disrupt it. That's shown by, for example, the changes they've made to filesharing to make life difficult for the Samba people; the fact that they not only don't document file formats for key applications, but change them slightly with every new application version; and now Sender-ID, where (apparently by order from BG personally) they insisted on licensing terms calculated to be incompatible with some of the most important free software licenses, including the GPL.
I think you're wrong about the Microsoft decision process - "If...this concept will make them more money...". Sender-ID would not make them any money; I very much doubt that anyone is going to migrate from Linux to Windows just to get the supposed benefits of Sender-ID! That's not what its for. Breaking interoperability is a corporate goal for Microsoft, because interoperability allows competitors to survive.
The thinnest language manual I've ever used was the BCPL manual, which described the full language and its library (with examples) in an A4-size manual less than 2mm thick. This was in the mid-1970s. Developed by Martin Richards at Cambridge (not sure when - 1970??), the language became popular at CERN and was used at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and elsewhere, and influenced the design of C.
The main effect of the rise of a competitive OS will be to lower prices to users, as Microsoft loses its ability to charge monopoly rents. In other words, the businesses that will really gain are computer software users, not computer software sellers or distributors.
The best way to profit from this trend in the stock market, therefore, is to bet against high profit growth of companies like Microsoft. Microsoft currently trades at a P/E multiple of 36. The long-term historical average for stock P/E ratios is in the range 14 to 17, so Microsoft's current price builds in the assumption that their profits will continue to grow exponentially, as they have in the past. If (like me) you think it unlikely that Microsoft will be able to double its profits anytime soon, then you could sell MSFT short. I sold at a price of $28.5 and it closed on Friday at $27.11, so the trade is doing OK so far.
If you do this, you need to control your risk, of course. Check the price every day, and if it closes above $29, accept that I was wrong and close the position.
Otherwise, there's a good chance that it will go down to $20 or less, so you're risking $1.89/share for a very good chance of gaining $7/share or more. Those are good odds.
This is simply not true. I've spent the last 8 years working for big multinational banks. They all have internal support organizations. When something breaks, you call the tech support hotline, which is usually to the bank's internal support group. In a few banks, this function is contracted out to a company like EDS, whose people would be on-site. Nobody ever calls the manufacturer or the software publisher. I've watched the tech support guys fix problems, and they don't call the manufacturer or software publisher either, they fix the problem themselves (which might sometimes involve replacing the machine or reinstalling the software).
We are also concerned that no company should be permitted intellectual property rights (IPR) over core Internet infrastructure.
Seems obvious to me. Why isn't it obvious to the IETF?
Debian again: We believe the IETF needs to revamp its IPR policies to ensure that the core Internet infrastructure remain unencumbered.Right on.
A company like Microsoft has no respect for the rights of others, no respect for ethics, no respect for the ideals of the people who built the Internet infrastructure for our benefit. I agree with Debian that no company should be permitted IP rights over core Internet infrastructure. But especially not a predatory company like Microsoft.
The post which you are complaining about points out that in order to receive certain services from the USPTO, you have to be running Microsoft Internet Explorer on a Microsoft operating system.
Now, the USPTO's services are funded by taxpayers, and it seems unreasonable to me that it should discriminate in favor of Microsoft customers, or give Microsoft a marketplace advantage.
Whether all the assertions in the post you are complaining about are precisely accurate or not is beside the point. If the main statement - i.e. that there are USPTO "public" services which you can't use unless you pay Microsoft - is correct, then this is an appalling disgrace, and a certain amount of hyperbole is understandable. You didn't provide any evidence to challenge the main point.
You can't define a "standard" by what one program does, because that program will change. IE 6 has different bugs from IE 5, and IE 7 will have different bugs from IE 6.
Adhering to the published W3C standards is the only way to go.
Personally, I find very, very few sites are written exclusively for IE, apart from microsoft.com sites. Most companies have more sense than to alienate 15% of their customers.
How many hits are your statistics based on? Unless you tell us that, we can't know whether your numbers are significantly different from the W3Schools numbers or not.
I disagree; I think the current version is a fine C++ compiler. What's wrong with it?
I know I'll get flamed/modded down for this, but it needs to be said: there is no reason for new apps to be written in C. C++ can do everything that C can do, just as efficiently; it's easier to read, which means a code review is more effective; language features and the STL reduce the need for explicit dynamic memory allocation, which is a source of bugs in C; the language is a better match than C to modern, object-oriented methods of analysis and design; - I could go on, but shouldn't need to.
That's not quite the situation. It works for Windows servers; as long as those servers aren't in domains which use name servers running on Windows 2000. I doubt that many name servers run on any version of Windows, except in intranets which aren't relevant here. That's probably why such a basic bug in Microsoft's implementation of DNS has remained for >4 years.