They have an agreement of some kind with the Egyptian governmenet whereby they provide a subsidised package for Egyptian university students. And subsidised in this context basically means free. What else can you call Win2k, Office 2k, and Visual Studio for the equivalent of US$ 5?
It's not like they have anything to lose; the beneficiaries, depriived of such an offer, would have gone ahead and pirated these things anyhow.
And did I mention the story of how MS has the local authorities so wrapped up that they basically direct the actions of the local equivalent of the IP police? Oh wait, never mind. That would be blatant MS-bashing and off-topic to boot.
So he's considering changing the registration test to a simple arithmetic problem. It won't stop the mass registrations, but he might be able to get the abusers to perform distributed computing tasks for him.
I wouldn't get my hopes up. If the calculation he needs is really complex, he should get himself a pocket calculator. I suspect that would be one hell of a lot faster.
Besides, I wouldn't want a bunch of pr0n hounds working out the reentry trajectory of the next-gen space shuttle.
The man page for gcc is bad enough... They could write something like "I love VB" somewhere in the midst of the thing and no one would ever get that far...
It occurs to me that this extreme level of efficiency just begs to be hooked up to an array of solar cells, not an exercise cycle.
Solar cells have been underutilised as a source of energy due to the low yield.
This seems like a nice and symbiotic combination of different technologies... "Hey, the solar cells don't give me much electricity, but the white LEDs illuminating the office building don't need all that much anyhow. W00t!"
What you are saying makes sense in this limited, above-intelligence community of ours. But you are making an assumption of shared values between these coworkers/employees and more clued-in people such as you and I.
IMO,one of the reasons people pay Microsoft money for their software is to remit payment for shielding them from the gory details of all things wired.
Let me filter out the jargon: people buy MS because it's supposed to be equally functional, but a hell of a lot easier to use.
The keyword here is 'equally functional'. By being this susceptible to moronic attempts at worm writing, MS fails to deliver in the 'equally functional' stakes.
Dumbing down an operating system does not have to be synonymous with hampering functionality. And virus susceptibility is definitely 'hampered functionality'.
No, it's not the user's fault. The client should be secure. Some things you can't blame on users.
Gershenfield and Hawley have been working on this one for ages over at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. Hardly news. PARC also, naturally, is in on it.
There's actually something called the 'Things that Think' Consortium working in this direction. Swatch is in it too; remember in the Barcelona Olympics how you could buy a special edition Swatch with an electronic tag in it, prepaid to allow you entrance to the events? Well, that was in 1992, a decade ago.
So in other words, what we have here hardly qualifies as news. Ubiquitous computing has been a work in progress for ages and will remain so for a few ages more; it's not vaporware, it just needs time.
But honestly, I fail to see why this qualifies as newsworthy, and a submission about successful experiments into getting monkeys to move a cursor with mind control isn't.
This kind of thing is what keeps me from subscribing, to be perfectly frank. Maybe when story submission/acceptance begins to follow more democratic guidelines like the moderation system.
OK. Idea. Let's see what you folks think about this one.
This case has established a precedent that elements of UI design can be copyrighted, lame as this decision is.
Wouldn't this set up the foundation for a lawsuit against Microsoft for ripping the whole WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) paradigm from Apple? Who in turn could get sued by PARC, I think it was?
If my reasoning here is correct, then we'd have a win-win situation; MS is sued and that damn OS is pulled from the shelves, or MS wins the court case and Macromedia gets the Adobe sentence nullified.
Say what you will, I can't wait for AotC- digital projector or not. I just wish *blatant non subtle hinting* some kind soul could get me into an early showing in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area;)
I'm really not sure how that fits in with this, a post from taco earlier today. For the lazy:
Rebuttal Number 1: Do you need the source code of an operating system as a user of that operating system? That is, should you be paying your people to study the intricacies of how the operating system is built and stuff like that? No, most people don't. There's actually a easy way out of having the simple end-user getting lost in the C and asm... Err, just don't look in the code.
Besides, there's two other segments of users not being addressed here. The first is people who actually by gosh *do* need the source code. There may not be that many, but their work is usually quite important/far-reaching and it affects those who do not need the source code. The second class Mr. Gates has overlooked by his unfortunate choice of wording is those who 'want' to look at the source code. If Mr. Gates needs a clarification of why someone would want to look at source when they don't need to, then his money's no good on thinkgeek.
Rebuttal Number 2: That's something that for a few percent of the price of the PC you can buy a commercial operating system, where all the work of testing it, supporting it, delivering it, is included for a few percent of that price of the PC Hm, I haven't the foggiest notion what Mr. Gates is trying to say here. It seems Mr. Gates holds the basic rules of grammar in as low regard as he does the GPL. Either that or he's excited about seeing Yoda in the new episode. Or perhaps he himself has no idea what he means. If he'll wrap that last one up in proper grammar, I'll be happy to respond.
Rebuttal Number 3: For customers who want source code -- universities, large customers -- we provide that. Doubtful. If Mr. Gates offered source code upon demand, to universities by way of example, I think we would have seen it by now. Any half-decent university would have jumped upon an opportunity such as this. Anyone out there with a university that counts MS as a supplier? Think you could provide feedback what happens when you say "Hey, we're a university, we have a big contract with you, and we'd like the source code." ? Hmm, large customers... anyone got any really fat relatives?
Rebuttal Number 4 Then you get to the issue of who is going to be the most innovative. You know, will it be capitalism, or will it be just people working at night? OK, what we're saying here is that it's capitalistic gain that is the prime instigator of innovation. This means that you can't write a good book if you're not being paid shovel-loads. And you can't compose great music if you're not getting rich off of it. And you're not a decent football player unless you're playing with Real Madrid or Man U. Mr. gates, I beg to differ as strongly as possible.
Rebuttal Number 5: And the farmers will go home at night and work on the source code. (Laughter.) If doctors can code, I don't see a problem with farmers coding. Oh, and I'm sure a farmer would laugh derisively too at the notion of a software magnate going home to tend to his crops and feed his livestock at night too.
Rebuttal Number 6: packaged software costs are never more than, say, three, four percent of any significant project 3-4%? What kind of computer do you base this calculation on, Mr. Gates? I can only imagine this figure would be accurate if you operated a Cray at home, or if you were referring to the cost of the RedHat CDs you bought. In other words, your math needs work as well as your grammar, I'm afraid.
# end of rebuttals - for now
As a final aside, I find it significant that most of the points in Gates' response concerned the welfare of the supplier/producer/seller. Mr. Gates appears to be wilfully disregarding that the GPL was designed to serve the user of the code, not the owner/writer. We really shouldn't let this man shift our focus away from this.
I know this is off-topic, but the pagelinked to here where I found this choice morsel from google's adwords policies:
Links: Ad links to your website must allow people to return from your site to the results page by clicking on the browser's BACK button. These links must open in the same browser window as the ad. Links to pages that spawn pop-up windows are not allowed.
I can't help but be impressed. And they don't go around blurting out how they protect user interests either.
As if that wasn't enough, I did a search today for hhgtg.txt. Try it yourself and see if you aren't impressed.
Nope. Shouldn't happen. Says there that the streaming audio server could theoretically handle 5 simultaneous users, but then the web server would die, so they only allow one TCP connection on the poor thing.
Major credibility plunge there. Not to judge the rest of the package, but it looks more like they're just grepping through the source for places where they can splash the words lindows and/or Michael Robertson. No value added.
Where I live, buying a new lower-end pc sets you back the equivalent of 2 months average salary. A hardware modem costs on average 5 to 6 times as much as a winmodem.
Consequentially, it's winmodems that have people round here online in troves. I currently have both kinds of modems, having been forced out of linux's charm to buy a hardware modem, but most people are not like that; with most people, getting online and being a netizen is a priority overriding hardware design ethics and operating system chauvinism.
If wifi ever takes hold in this country, it will only be if they're cheap; that can only be helped if there's a software layer somewhere in there saving you some moolah.
Soaking up CPU cycles? C'mon. Even in a power-user thick forum such as this one, how many people utilise their cycles beyond 10 or 20% over time? Distributed.net and SETI@home don't count, mind you.
Seems to me the only question here is whether we will go through the same heartache we did with winmodems, what with closed chipset specs and chipset makers digging their heels in not to release such information. This seems to me to mainly be an issue of profit margins: what makes more money, hardware solutions or their corresponding software emulations?
Generally, a more expensive product is more likely to carry a larger profit margin for many reasons. The higher complexity of the product acts as a kind of barrier to entry into the market segment freeing up the supplier to play a bit with the price, and there are always economies of scale, even at this level.
In other words, the per-unit profit is likely to be higher for hardware solutions. Now the question has become one of pure demand and supply; are the incremental profits from a hardware solution greater than the incremental volume generated from a software solution?
There really wasn't any need to start subscriptions here on/. now was there, Taco, when you could simply have charged hapless siteadmins in exchange for rejecting submissions linking to their machines...
This is simply an interesting, albeit apparently unintentional application of newtonian mechanics to social studies.
You know, the whole hoopla about how the behaviour of a system can be foretold if its initial state is known in entirety.
In theory, however, this does provide some interesting food for thought. If a contained system could be found, its initial state recorded, and permutations of its subsequent development run, we would have the first simulation of parallel universes.
Assuming, of course, that Newtonian mechanics allow for permutations. Which they don't. And assuming that it would be at all possible to record absolutely the initial conditions of a contained system. Impossible. As many of us know, the mere act of observation counts as interference in any experiment.
All the same, an interesting article if not revolutionary. Hey, it got me musing, didn't it.
At the risk of incurring the usual racialslurs, let me set the record straight on one point.
Katz had to make his usual thinly veiled references to the muslim world. The posts were full of the ignorant anti-arab jabber of people whose idea of independent media is CNN and the bloody Drudge Report.
I'm half arab, and I live in the middle east. I am sitting here right now with street demonstrations outside well into their 5th straight hour chanting anti-government, anti-military, and anti-US slogans.
Yes, the people on the street here have an axe to grind with the US, and to a lesser extent the rest of the West. That axe is Israel/Palestine.
What I'm trying to say here is that the reason people her don't like youy folks is because you don't bother to check whether your government's foreign policy is in any way related to justice.
I"m not going to look for good guys and bad guys here; bombing civilians is bad, just as using military force against a civilian population is.
Stop going on about how the 'islamic orient feels inferior and therefore hates the west'. It's getting old. Start understanding the mistakes made at the beginning of the century by Lord Balfour and subsequently by the US government.
Oh, and Katz? Go away please. You're superficial. That's a quality that has hampered the west from dealing adequately till this day with the issues in the middle east. Media whoring is the last thing this issue needs.
Under this plan, an ad that a person sees on a Web site might be hosted by a nearby computer running Brilliant's Altnet instead of on a central ad server, as now typically happens with DoubleClick.
Well, this seems pretty much to be the end of ad blocking through firewall rules... Pretty easy to see why doubleclick would like this scheme.
You'd basically never know what host would be spamming your browser...
Slashdot Mirror
Metacity saved our business. Maybe it will save slashdot, too
Let's get one thing clear; metacity is not Jesus, allright?
And if it took a new window manager to save your company, then I need its name. I'm worried I might be a stockholder.
:-)
Correct. And MS knows this quite well indeed.
They have an agreement of some kind with the Egyptian governmenet whereby they provide a subsidised package for Egyptian university students. And subsidised in this context basically means free. What else can you call Win2k, Office 2k, and Visual Studio for the equivalent of US$ 5?
It's not like they have anything to lose; the beneficiaries, depriived of such an offer, would have gone ahead and pirated these things anyhow.
And did I mention the story of how MS has the local authorities so wrapped up that they basically direct the actions of the local equivalent of the IP police? Oh wait, never mind. That would be blatant MS-bashing and off-topic to boot.
So he's considering changing the registration test to a simple arithmetic problem. It won't stop the mass registrations, but he might be able to get the abusers to perform distributed computing tasks for him.
I wouldn't get my hopes up. If the calculation he needs is really complex, he should get himself a pocket calculator. I suspect that would be one hell of a lot faster.
Besides, I wouldn't want a bunch of pr0n hounds working out the reentry trajectory of the next-gen space shuttle.
Need I say more?
Wonder how long the man page is.
The man page for gcc is bad enough... They could write something like "I love VB" somewhere in the midst of the thing and no one would ever get that far...
Hmm.
I for one would be interested in seeing a benchmark between this and the white LED's we're talking about here.
It occurs to me that this extreme level of efficiency just begs to be hooked up to an array of solar cells, not an exercise cycle.
Solar cells have been underutilised as a source of energy due to the low yield.
This seems like a nice and symbiotic combination of different technologies... "Hey, the solar cells don't give me much electricity, but the white LEDs illuminating the office building don't need all that much anyhow. W00t!"
I'll bite.
,one of the reasons people pay Microsoft money for their software is to remit payment for shielding them from the gory details of all things wired.
What you are saying makes sense in this limited, above-intelligence community of ours. But you are making an assumption of shared values between these coworkers/employees and more clued-in people such as you and I.
IMO
Let me filter out the jargon: people buy MS because it's supposed to be equally functional, but a hell of a lot easier to use.
The keyword here is 'equally functional'. By being this susceptible to moronic attempts at worm writing, MS fails to deliver in the 'equally functional' stakes.
Dumbing down an operating system does not have to be synonymous with hampering functionality. And virus susceptibility is definitely 'hampered functionality'.
No, it's not the user's fault. The client should be secure. Some things you can't blame on users.
Gershenfield and Hawley have been working on this one for ages over at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. Hardly news. PARC also, naturally, is in on it.
There's actually something called the 'Things that Think' Consortium working in this direction. Swatch is in it too; remember in the Barcelona Olympics how you could buy a special edition Swatch with an electronic tag in it, prepaid to allow you entrance to the events? Well, that was in 1992, a decade ago.
So in other words, what we have here hardly qualifies as news. Ubiquitous computing has been a work in progress for ages and will remain so for a few ages more; it's not vaporware, it just needs time.
But honestly, I fail to see why this qualifies as newsworthy, and a submission about successful experiments into getting monkeys to move a cursor with mind control isn't.
This kind of thing is what keeps me from subscribing, to be perfectly frank. Maybe when story submission/acceptance begins to follow more democratic guidelines like the moderation system.
Open letter to John Carmack:
The masses demand their 'iddqd' and 'idkfa'. We wimps wanna Doom too. And three even.
OK. Idea. Let's see what you folks think about this one.
This case has established a precedent that elements of UI design can be copyrighted, lame as this decision is.
Wouldn't this set up the foundation for a lawsuit against Microsoft for ripping the whole WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) paradigm from Apple? Who in turn could get sued by PARC, I think it was?
If my reasoning here is correct, then we'd have a win-win situation; MS is sued and that damn OS is pulled from the shelves, or MS wins the court case and Macromedia gets the Adobe sentence nullified.
Any lawyers skulking about to comment?
Hmm.
;)
:-)
Say what you will, I can't wait for AotC- digital projector or not. I just wish *blatant non subtle hinting* some kind soul could get me into an early showing in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area
I'm really not sure how that fits in with this, a post from taco earlier today. For the lazy:
just the same as I no longer have any interest in seeing the upcoming Star Wars movie
This is one fickle editor to be sure... PSST! Taco, gotcha
thinking that a 14 incher sucked...
Rebuttal Number 1:
Do you need the source code of an operating system as a user of that operating system? That is, should you be paying your people to study the intricacies of how the operating system is built and stuff like that?
No, most people don't. There's actually a easy way out of having the simple end-user getting lost in the C and asm... Err, just don't look in the code.
Besides, there's two other segments of users not being addressed here. The first is people who actually by gosh *do* need the source code. There may not be that many, but their work is usually quite important/far-reaching and it affects those who do not need the source code. The second class Mr. Gates has overlooked by his unfortunate choice of wording is those who 'want' to look at the source code. If Mr. Gates needs a clarification of why someone would want to look at source when they don't need to, then his money's no good on thinkgeek.
Rebuttal Number 2:
That's something that for a few percent of the price of the PC you can buy a commercial operating system, where all the work of testing it, supporting it, delivering it, is included for a few percent of that price of the PC
Hm, I haven't the foggiest notion what Mr. Gates is trying to say here. It seems Mr. Gates holds the basic rules of grammar in as low regard as he does the GPL. Either that or he's excited about seeing Yoda in the new episode. Or perhaps he himself has no idea what he means. If he'll wrap that last one up in proper grammar, I'll be happy to respond.
Rebuttal Number 3:
For customers who want source code -- universities, large customers -- we provide that.
Doubtful. If Mr. Gates offered source code upon demand, to universities by way of example, I think we would have seen it by now. Any half-decent university would have jumped upon an opportunity such as this. Anyone out there with a university that counts MS as a supplier? Think you could provide feedback what happens when you say "Hey, we're a university, we have a big contract with you, and we'd like the source code." ? Hmm, large customers... anyone got any really fat relatives?
Rebuttal Number 4
Then you get to the issue of who is going to be the most innovative. You know, will it be capitalism, or will it be just people working at night?
OK, what we're saying here is that it's capitalistic gain that is the prime instigator of innovation. This means that you can't write a good book if you're not being paid shovel-loads. And you can't compose great music if you're not getting rich off of it. And you're not a decent football player unless you're playing with Real Madrid or Man U. Mr. gates, I beg to differ as strongly as possible.
Rebuttal Number 5:
And the farmers will go home at night and work on the source code. (Laughter.)
If doctors can code, I don't see a problem with farmers coding. Oh, and I'm sure a farmer would laugh derisively too at the notion of a software magnate going home to tend to his crops and feed his livestock at night too.
Rebuttal Number 6:
packaged software costs are never more than, say, three, four percent of any significant project
3-4%? What kind of computer do you base this calculation on, Mr. Gates? I can only imagine this figure would be accurate if you operated a Cray at home, or if you were referring to the cost of the RedHat CDs you bought. In other words, your math needs work as well as your grammar, I'm afraid.
# end of rebuttals - for now
As a final aside, I find it significant that most of the points in Gates' response concerned the welfare of the supplier/producer/seller. Mr. Gates appears to be wilfully disregarding that the GPL was designed to serve the user of the code, not the owner/writer. We really shouldn't let this man shift our focus away from this.
Silly man.
I know this is off-topic, but the page linked to here where I found this choice morsel from google's adwords policies:
Links: Ad links to your website must allow people to return from your site to the results page by clicking on the browser's BACK button. These links must open in the same browser window as the ad. Links to pages that spawn pop-up windows are not allowed.
I can't help but be impressed. And they don't go around blurting out how they protect user interests either.
As if that wasn't enough, I did a search today for hhgtg.txt. Try it yourself and see if you aren't impressed.
Defies the whole persona of vim. vim loses what makes it useful when you stick it in a window and add menus and buttons.
vim is all about those wierd keystrokes you learn that funnily enough grow on you and multiply your productivity.
While I'm sure you can still do this with kvim, I don't see what would get a real vim user to use kvim rather than just vim in konsole.
Nice idea, like I said, but I don't expect too much takeup.
Nope. Shouldn't happen. Says there that the streaming audio server could theoretically handle 5 simultaneous users, but then the web server would die, so they only allow one TCP connection on the poor thing.
Umm, wait, I think it *is* down...
but I have one word for this chap: LEECH.
I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when I came across:
Kword repackaged as Wordpublisher
and other rebadged stuff
Major credibility plunge there. Not to judge the rest of the package, but it looks more like they're just grepping through the source for places where they can splash the words lindows and/or Michael Robertson. No value added.
Like I said, leech.
Where I live, buying a new lower-end pc sets you back the equivalent of 2 months average salary. A hardware modem costs on average 5 to 6 times as much as a winmodem.
Consequentially, it's winmodems that have people round here online in troves. I currently have both kinds of modems, having been forced out of linux's charm to buy a hardware modem, but most people are not like that; with most people, getting online and being a netizen is a priority overriding hardware design ethics and operating system chauvinism.
If wifi ever takes hold in this country, it will only be if they're cheap; that can only be helped if there's a software layer somewhere in there saving you some moolah.
Soaking up CPU cycles? C'mon. Even in a power-user thick forum such as this one, how many people utilise their cycles beyond 10 or 20% over time? Distributed.net and SETI@home don't count, mind you.
Seems to me the only question here is whether we will go through the same heartache we did with winmodems, what with closed chipset specs and chipset makers digging their heels in not to release such information. This seems to me to mainly be an issue of profit margins: what makes more money, hardware solutions or their corresponding software emulations?
Generally, a more expensive product is more likely to carry a larger profit margin for many reasons. The higher complexity of the product acts as a kind of barrier to entry into the market segment freeing up the supplier to play a bit with the price, and there are always economies of scale, even at this level.
In other words, the per-unit profit is likely to be higher for hardware solutions. Now the question has become one of pure demand and supply; are the incremental profits from a hardware solution greater than the incremental volume generated from a software solution?
There really wasn't any need to start subscriptions here on /. now was there, Taco, when you could simply have charged hapless siteadmins in exchange for rejecting submissions linking to their machines...
Gah, do I have to do all the thinking round here?
This is simply an interesting, albeit apparently unintentional application of newtonian mechanics to social studies.
You know, the whole hoopla about how the behaviour of a system can be foretold if its initial state is known in entirety.
In theory, however, this does provide some interesting food for thought. If a contained system could be found, its initial state recorded, and permutations of its subsequent development run, we would have the first simulation of parallel universes.
Assuming, of course, that Newtonian mechanics allow for permutations. Which they don't. And assuming that it would be at all possible to record absolutely the initial conditions of a contained system. Impossible. As many of us know, the mere act of observation counts as interference in any experiment.
All the same, an interesting article if not revolutionary. Hey, it got me musing, didn't it.
Some names are just too stupid to be believed.
If linux was called GNU/Ooqa Ooqa instead of GNU/linux I would never have used it.
Honest. It truly leaves me speechless how mindless brand names are getting. Ooqa bloody Ooqa? WTF?
Did some marketing drone actually get paid for belching this one up?
At the risk of incurring the usual racial slurs, let me set the record straight on one point.
Katz had to make his usual thinly veiled references to the muslim world. The posts were full of the ignorant anti-arab jabber of people whose idea of independent media is CNN and the bloody Drudge Report.
I'm half arab, and I live in the middle east. I am sitting here right now with street demonstrations outside well into their 5th straight hour chanting anti-government, anti-military, and anti-US slogans.
Yes, the people on the street here have an axe to grind with the US, and to a lesser extent the rest of the West. That axe is Israel/Palestine.
What I'm trying to say here is that the reason people her don't like youy folks is because you don't bother to check whether your government's foreign policy is in any way related to justice.
I"m not going to look for good guys and bad guys here; bombing civilians is bad, just as using military force against a civilian population is.
But the US foreign policy is just way off. Get your facts straight before flaming me.
Stop going on about how the 'islamic orient feels inferior and therefore hates the west'. It's getting old. Start understanding the mistakes made at the beginning of the century by Lord Balfour and subsequently by the US government.
Oh, and Katz? Go away please. You're superficial. That's a quality that has hampered the west from dealing adequately till this day with the issues in the middle east. Media whoring is the last thing this issue needs.
Farewell karma, you have served me well.
Under this plan, an ad that a person sees on a Web site might be hosted by a nearby computer running Brilliant's Altnet instead of on a central ad server, as now typically happens with DoubleClick.
Well, this seems pretty much to be the end of ad blocking through firewall rules... Pretty easy to see why doubleclick would like this scheme.
You'd basically never know what host would be spamming your browser...
*sigh*
... to get people to read what you write, then I guess we're in for a lot of Jon Katz stories.
Bleh.