I don't mind that they are using my purchase data. What I DO mind is that the service insists on recommending crappy, overpromoted songs that I would never, ever like (and I can't get it to stop).
I turned off the service because I was tired of being told that I would like Will Smith's "Switch". This is just blatant promotion as I haven't bought anything remotely like it. In a way -- this IS using my data for 3rd parties by making me believe that there is some correlation between my tastes and overhyped crap that has flooded the national earspace.
If they are going to collect my data, they should, as a courtesy, do something smart with it.
It was impressive to see that Safari can now pass the acid2 test. . . Now it is the most standards compliant browser: http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/
I'm rooting for firefox to catch up -- it is usually the heavyweight in this area but it has been passed up.
Anyone who is savvy enough to need GRID computing is savvy enough to build their own grid very cheaply. Sun's GRID would only be useful for times where one's own grid is overloaded for brief periods of time and you don't want to scale up (a confluence of factors that is very hard to predict and order from Sun ahead of time).
I'm surprised that there wasn't more of a business analysis of this ahead of time before they plunked down a ton of money to make it happen.
Integrated Replication MySQL > Postgres; Postgres has a sister product called Slony I that is hard to set up and only offers master-slave replication. In my opinion, this has been the main downside to postgres for a long time.
I have respect for what you are saying but there are a few points we disagree on.
1) Your contention: Small business and market forces will always choose the best way. My rebuttal: When the small businesses of yesteryear chose Microsoft (and are now mid-to-large businesses), they did so because Microsoft and the market incented them to. This will not change. When there is a monopoly player, by definition they have ultimate pricing power in a sector - by definition then markets favor monopolies.
2) You contend: Governments are inefficient, therefore they are bad adopters of open source. I rebut: Governments _are_ inefficient, no beef with you there. Here's the rub though - they are the only channel for tasks that are inherently social that can't be achieved by market forces. If there is no money to be made by a certain endeavor that ensures the public good, then the government _has_ to do it. . . especially if the alternative is public harm. Ensuring the competitive marketplace is _precisely_ one of those tasks. By dictating that everyone use a standard, open format, you encourage competition in the word-processing market and you give consumers choice. . . voila, you are doing a very pro-freemarket thing.
3) You contend: The government is unneccessary and only screws things up. I rebut: Governments are _great_ at screwing things up. . . we agree there. But what is the alternative? Try living in a chaotic country via mob rule -- it is a truly terrible thing. (Hobbes described life without government as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"). There will always be someone who will try to dominate you if there is no governmental buffer. At least with a government, you have some promises made to you and some hand in how you are treated. Your task should be to make that government as just and favorable to you as possible (if you are lucky enough to live in a democracy) rather than try to get rid of it entirely and be left with capricious power-hungry whims of the most powerful arch-citizens at your throat.
I get very excited when I read these governmental switching stories. Governments are the only real business users that can effectively mandate file-formats and interoperability standards. Businesses will follow because they must.
Even in the US, I hear of companies switching whole departments over to OSS on Windows (namely openoffice). These are actually large companies switching over whole departments in regional offices.
I think that there is a network-effect of these early adopters. If there are enough of them that mandate that you have open-office installed, then (at some point near or just less than ~50%) there will be a sea-change of business that will switch over in one fell swoop. If it turns out that it is a business requirement that you use and have training for open-office, then people will wonder why they are voluntarily paying for Microsoft Office for no good reason. (Legacy docs in MSOffice is not a good enough reason to stay - support for these docs in OpenOffice will be demanded and feverishly worked on if enough enough businesses want it)
Once the slide starts, it will be a brutal few years for Microsoft Office.
We evaluated BlueArc. . . we didn't choose it because it was "too new" in the market, but its network filer has unbelievable performance (Note: I don't work for BlueArc and it makes me a little queasy to support a commercial product).
BlueArc does all of their fileserving via microcoded hardware. Instead of using a plain old OS to build the fileserver, they do it in hardware modules dedicated to the task. This means that there is no OS overhead and the different modules (TCP/IP, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, etc) have their own memory and work together in a pipeline. The performance they get from this is really sick. (Think one Bluearc machine is 3 times faster than a cluster of the highest end Netapps).
Behind the hardware front-end, you have a hardware raid-system that is long on cache (It's actually the raid unit from Engenio -- formerly LSI) with shelves configured with raid 5. Bluearc actually treats all of these raid-5 shelves as disks that it does raid-1 across. This gives you redundancy and double-striping in hardware from end to end. Did I mention that it was fast? It is - just check out specs.org to see how fast the thing is.
expect this format to be XML with tons of binary CDATA sections that are neither human readable nor parseable with anything but Microsoft stuff.
If you think that their use of XML will make the format any more "open" then they should bundle a bridge with their Office suite because you'll buy anything.
If Alexis de Toquevill were alive and realized what these shitheads were doing in his name, he'd probably barf out his heart.
Here's a quote from the real Alexis de Toqueville about the tendencies of American's to help each other out: "I must say that I have seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and I have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another."
Sounds pretty different from the message of these bought-off scumbags.
Microsoft gives us permission to use the copywritten/trademarked parts of.Net not covered by the ECMA specs.
Microsoft gives us permission to use the copywritten/trademarked parts of.Net that are covered by the ECMA specs.
Microsoft assures us that they will not deviate from the ECMA specification for the platform like they did with ECMAscript (Javascript)
.Net offers anywhere near the same enterprise library support as Java and has the backing of a number of companies that aren't Microsoft
I'm sorry to be a party-pooper, but these are still real issues. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away. You are talking about a technology that is legally locked up by a company that HATES the open-source community and phenomenon. Living under the thumb of someone that hates you is not something I would relish.
You can do this on any operating system by default except for some of the the mainframe ones. (Including windows, BSDs, Solaris, BeOS, Linux, etc. etc)
You can prevent this by putting in shell limits in the master profiles, but these are arbitrary restrictions that limit your users and only should be done if you don't trust them.
This must be a slow security newsday for these guys if they are talking about forkbombing or memory eaters.
The derivation of the S-Boxes are a secret. Changing the numbers in the S-Boxes certainly weaken DES, but it is not published as to _why_ the ones the NSA picked are so strong and how they were derived.
There are big differences between Apple and Microsoft.
Microsoft goes out of its way to steal competitor products (Sybase SQL server and OS2/Windows) copy innovations without any consideration to the originators (see GUI interface and mice: which both copied but apple paid stock for when they borrowed it), choke the life out of people they have contracts with (Look at the spyglass to IE story) and sabotage technology standards that they don't control (See Java and the butchery they did to Javascript/ECMAscript the supposed standard). Even in their originally innovative products, they primarily engage in anti-competitive, intentional incompatibilities (See every upgrade of Microsoft Office) that sabotage the compatibility efforts of others.
Apple does none of these things. They are innovating, inventing and are really careful about asking people to mind their own business. They want to make their money by selling the best products in a category - Microsoft wants to make their money by being the only company to sell products in every category.
To sum it all up: Apple makes, Microsoft takes. If Apple is cooking up new, tasty technology, they have a right to privacy.
IP issues have been solved a long time ago. While Microsoft didn't publicly comment on IP issues in Mono, the legal department at Novell feels that any action taken by Microsoft against mono would be in amazingly bad faith and for 90% of Mono would be impossible to impose.
Clearly YANAL (You are not a lawyer). Just because Microsoft doesn't address something doesn't mean they won't sue you tail off about it later.
Also, Microsoft is used to acting in "amazingly bad faith" over languages/runtimes. Look at Java for examples.
With all the positive support they have given towards it would be in bad interests to suddenly change on that and would be against anti-trust laws.
It would be in whose bad interests? It would only be in their good interests to screw the opensource world . Trust me, Microsoft could care less about the good relationship that they've been building with Ximian or Novell. They are a company that is used to pulling fast ones like this.
Sure, I know that you can do without Genuine Microsoft binaries for much of Mono, but being blocked from having updates sure hurts the compatibility argument to Mono. (ie. updates to the.Net project can easily be withheld and apps written on the MS platform can be forced to link against them)
I know that many Wine libraries are needed for the Forms libaries and this will be a blow for dll updates and changes there.
If Microsoft tries to enforce their patent protections on top of this kind of thing, it will be game-over for the new Gnome development on Mono. Score: Microsoft 1, Linux Desktop -1
Microsoft seems really open to fair competition and doesn't resort to extortion or underhanded legal tactics.
On this very sound footing, I suggest that we use an 80% patent-encumbered standard with Microsoft's core interests at stake. Let's base our core desktop software on it and hope our regular and very consistent enemy won't try to do anything nasty to us!
PS: To all the dreamers who are going to tell me that CLR and C# are ECMA/ISO standard. . . Let me tell you that published standards hold no weight against the market standard-bearer and should remember that Javascript was an ECMA standard called ECMAscript and they still onesy-toosied the Javascript standard.
People keep acting as apologists for Bush saying that human embryonic stem-cell research wasn't really outlawed by the federal government. . . he just stopped funding.
How was it supposed to happen without funding? _My_ tax dollars go into those research coffers and it makes me _really_ angry that they can't be used for this research to better the survival chances of our species because of some phony pseudo-morality political pandering.
I wish people would top being "technically correct" and discuss the real issue at hand . . stem cell research outside of the current lines of embyronic stem cells. was seriously hindered by the actions of this government - and the current stem-cell lines may be tainted.
I think this is a way for them to make money on (or get credit for) selling you a shoddy product and then selling you an expensive bandaid.
As I try to remind people. There are almost no "email" viruses. There are "Outlook viruses." Outlook wasn't always the number one email client, but it has always been the number one email client with security problems.
There is almost no general "spyware". There is almost only "IE spyware". IE wasn't always the premier browser, but it has always had the biggest/most security holes.
If it weren't for Microsoft's shoddy programming and lack of concern for security, we wouldn't have nearly the problems we do in IT security. This is a great example where cut-throat marketing and vicious anti-competitive practices are enough to dominate a technology market. . . at the expense of a society at large.
This is a horrible fallacy. ..just look at US foreign policy failures over the last 50 years to understand in depth why these are NOT words of wisdom.
He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.
This is also not often true... unless you define control as "determining how limited or non-functional something becomes". A few examples: 1) Computer Software 2) Love 3) the environment
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mind that they are using my purchase data. What I DO mind is that the service insists on recommending crappy, overpromoted songs that I would never, ever like (and I can't get it to stop).
I turned off the service because I was tired of being told that I would like Will Smith's "Switch". This is just blatant promotion as I haven't bought anything remotely like it. In a way -- this IS using my data for 3rd parties by making me believe that there is some correlation between my tastes and overhyped crap that has flooded the national earspace.
If they are going to collect my data, they should, as a courtesy, do something smart with it.
I've had my eye on Roller for a long time (I think it is bundled with mac osx too). Is anyone using this?
http://www.rollerweblogger.org/
It took about 5 minutes for me to set up, but I never really got into the blog rythym.
Do the heavy-duty bloggers out there like it?
It was impressive to see that Safari can now pass the acid2 test. . . Now it is the most standards compliant browser:
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/
I'm rooting for firefox to catch up -- it is usually the heavyweight in this area but it has been passed up.
Anyone who is savvy enough to need GRID computing is savvy enough to build their own grid very cheaply. Sun's GRID would only be useful for times where one's own grid is overloaded for brief periods of time and you don't want to scale up (a confluence of factors that is very hard to predict and order from Sun ahead of time).
I'm surprised that there wasn't more of a business analysis of this ahead of time before they plunked down a ton of money to make it happen.
Integrated Replication
MySQL > Postgres; Postgres has a sister product called Slony I that is hard to set up and only offers master-slave replication. In my opinion, this has been the main downside to postgres for a long time.
I have respect for what you are saying but there are a few points we disagree on.
1) Your contention: Small business and market forces will always choose the best way.
My rebuttal: When the small businesses of yesteryear chose Microsoft (and are now mid-to-large businesses), they did so because Microsoft and the market incented them to. This will not change. When there is a monopoly player, by definition they have ultimate pricing power in a sector - by definition then markets favor monopolies.
2) You contend: Governments are inefficient, therefore they are bad adopters of open source.
I rebut: Governments _are_ inefficient, no beef with you there. Here's the rub though - they are the only channel for tasks that are inherently social that can't be achieved by market forces. If there is no money to be made by a certain endeavor that ensures the public good, then the government _has_ to do it. . . especially if the alternative is public harm. Ensuring the competitive marketplace is _precisely_ one of those tasks. By dictating that everyone use a standard, open format, you encourage competition in the word-processing market and you give consumers choice. . . voila, you are doing a very pro-freemarket thing.
3) You contend: The government is unneccessary and only screws things up.
I rebut: Governments are _great_ at screwing things up. . . we agree there. But what is the alternative? Try living in a chaotic country via mob rule -- it is a truly terrible thing. (Hobbes described life without government as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"). There will always be someone who will try to dominate you if there is no governmental buffer. At least with a government, you have some promises made to you and some hand in how you are treated. Your task should be to make that government as just and favorable to you as possible (if you are lucky enough to live in a democracy) rather than try to get rid of it entirely and be left with capricious power-hungry whims of the most powerful arch-citizens at your throat.
I get very excited when I read these governmental switching stories. Governments are the only real business users that can effectively mandate file-formats and interoperability standards. Businesses will follow because they must.
Even in the US, I hear of companies switching whole departments over to OSS on Windows (namely openoffice). These are actually large companies switching over whole departments in regional offices.
I think that there is a network-effect of these early adopters. If there are enough of them that mandate that you have open-office installed, then (at some point near or just less than ~50%) there will be a sea-change of business that will switch over in one fell swoop. If it turns out that it is a business requirement that you use and have training for open-office, then people will wonder why they are voluntarily paying for Microsoft Office for no good reason. (Legacy docs in MSOffice is not a good enough reason to stay - support for these docs in OpenOffice will be demanded and feverishly worked on if enough enough businesses want it)
Once the slide starts, it will be a brutal few years for Microsoft Office.
We evaluated BlueArc. . . we didn't choose it because it was "too new" in the market, but its network filer has unbelievable performance (Note: I don't work for BlueArc and it makes me a little queasy to support a commercial product).
BlueArc does all of their fileserving via microcoded hardware. Instead of using a plain old OS to build the fileserver, they do it in hardware modules dedicated to the task. This means that there is no OS overhead and the different modules (TCP/IP, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, etc) have their own memory and work together in a pipeline. The performance they get from this is really sick. (Think one Bluearc machine is 3 times faster than a cluster of the highest end Netapps).
Behind the hardware front-end, you have a hardware raid-system that is long on cache (It's actually the raid unit from Engenio -- formerly LSI) with shelves configured with raid 5. Bluearc actually treats all of these raid-5 shelves as disks that it does raid-1 across. This gives you redundancy and double-striping in hardware from end to end. Did I mention that it was fast? It is - just check out specs.org to see how fast the thing is.
expect this format to be XML with tons of binary CDATA sections that are neither human readable nor parseable with anything but Microsoft stuff.
If you think that their use of XML will make the format any more "open" then they should bundle a bridge with their Office suite because you'll buy anything.
I hear that the Sun Java Desktop is going to change the icon labelled "The Computer" to "The Network".
bah duhm bum.
OK grammar gestapo. . . I realize that "American's" should have been "Americans" above and that I misspelled Toqueville without an "e" at the end.
Cut me some slack, i'm tired.
If Alexis de Toquevill were alive and realized what these shitheads were doing in his name, he'd probably barf out his heart.
Here's a quote from the real Alexis de Toqueville about the tendencies of American's to help each other out:
"I must say that I have seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and I have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another."
Sounds pretty different from the message of these bought-off scumbags.
Someone wake me up when:
- Microsoft gives us permission to use the copywritten/trademarked parts of
.Net not covered by the ECMA specs.
- Microsoft gives us permission to use the copywritten/trademarked parts of
.Net that are covered by the ECMA specs.
- Microsoft assures us that they will not deviate from the ECMA specification for the platform like they did with ECMAscript (Javascript)
- .Net offers anywhere near the same enterprise library support as Java and has the backing of a number of companies that aren't Microsoft
I'm sorry to be a party-pooper, but these are still real issues. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away. You are talking about a technology that is legally locked up by a company that HATES the open-source community and phenomenon. Living under the thumb of someone that hates you is not something I would relish.You can do this on any operating system by default except for some of the the mainframe ones. (Including windows, BSDs, Solaris, BeOS, Linux, etc. etc)
You can prevent this by putting in shell limits in the master profiles, but these are arbitrary restrictions that limit your users and only should be done if you don't trust them.
This must be a slow security newsday for these guys if they are talking about forkbombing or memory eaters.
What?! Which aspects would these be?
The derivation of the S-Boxes are a secret. Changing the numbers in the S-Boxes certainly weaken DES, but it is not published as to _why_ the ones the NSA picked are so strong and how they were derived.
Xerox paper sure didn't help Xerox.
There are big differences between Apple and Microsoft.
Microsoft goes out of its way to steal competitor products (Sybase SQL server and OS2/Windows) copy innovations without any consideration to the originators (see GUI interface and mice: which both copied but apple paid stock for when they borrowed it), choke the life out of people they have contracts with (Look at the spyglass to IE story) and sabotage technology standards that they don't control (See Java and the butchery they did to Javascript/ECMAscript the supposed standard). Even in their originally innovative products, they primarily engage in anti-competitive, intentional incompatibilities (See every upgrade of Microsoft Office) that sabotage the compatibility efforts of others.
Apple does none of these things. They are innovating, inventing and are really careful about asking people to mind their own business. They want to make their money by selling the best products in a category - Microsoft wants to make their money by being the only company to sell products in every category.
To sum it all up: Apple makes, Microsoft takes. If Apple is cooking up new, tasty technology, they have a right to privacy.
IP issues have been solved a long time ago. While Microsoft didn't publicly comment on IP issues in Mono, the legal department at Novell feels that any action taken by Microsoft against mono would be in amazingly bad faith and for 90% of Mono would be impossible to impose.
Clearly YANAL (You are not a lawyer). Just because Microsoft doesn't address something doesn't mean they won't sue you tail off about it later.
Also, Microsoft is used to acting in "amazingly bad faith" over languages/runtimes. Look at Java for examples.
With all the positive support they have given towards it would be in bad interests to suddenly change on that and would be against anti-trust laws.
It would be in whose bad interests? It would only be in their good interests to screw the opensource world . Trust me, Microsoft could care less about the good relationship that they've been building with Ximian or Novell. They are a company that is used to pulling fast ones like this.
The number in question is currently being double-checked by George Woltman, organizer of GIMPS
Somehow, I don't think that the world will be threatened by George Woltman and his organized gimps.
This is a sign of things to come for Mono.
.Net project can easily be withheld and apps written on the MS platform can be forced to link against them)
Sure, I know that you can do without Genuine Microsoft binaries for much of Mono, but being blocked from having updates sure hurts the compatibility argument to Mono. (ie. updates to the
I know that many Wine libraries are needed for the Forms libaries and this will be a blow for dll updates and changes there.
If Microsoft tries to enforce their patent protections on top of this kind of thing, it will be game-over for the new Gnome development on Mono. Score: Microsoft 1, Linux Desktop -1
Microsoft seems really open to fair competition and doesn't resort to extortion or underhanded legal tactics.
On this very sound footing, I suggest that we use an 80% patent-encumbered standard with Microsoft's core interests at stake. Let's base our core desktop software on it and hope our regular and very consistent enemy won't try to do anything nasty to us!
PS: To all the dreamers who are going to tell me that CLR and C# are ECMA/ISO standard. . . Let me tell you that published standards hold no weight against the market standard-bearer and should remember that Javascript was an ECMA standard called ECMAscript and they still onesy-toosied the Javascript standard.
People keep acting as apologists for Bush saying that human embryonic stem-cell research wasn't really outlawed by the federal government. . . he just stopped funding.
How was it supposed to happen without funding? _My_ tax dollars go into those research coffers and it makes me _really_ angry that they can't be used for this research to better the survival chances of our species because of some phony pseudo-morality political pandering.
I wish people would top being "technically correct" and discuss the real issue at hand . . stem cell research outside of the current lines of embyronic stem cells. was seriously hindered by the actions of this government - and the current stem-cell lines may be tainted.
I think this is a way for them to make money on (or get credit for) selling you a shoddy product and then selling you an expensive bandaid.
As I try to remind people. There are almost no "email" viruses. There are "Outlook viruses." Outlook wasn't always the number one email client, but it has always been the number one email client with security problems.
There is almost no general "spyware". There is almost only "IE spyware". IE wasn't always the premier browser, but it has always had the biggest/most security holes.
If it weren't for Microsoft's shoddy programming and lack of concern for security, we wouldn't have nearly the problems we do in IT security. This is a great example where cut-throat marketing and vicious anti-competitive practices are enough to dominate a technology market. . . at the expense of a society at large.
Are they bringing out netscape just to fragment the userbase of Firefox?
If they want to add AOL extras, why not just bring out a "Firefox" by AOL version? or a "Firefox powered by AOL"?
Everyone knows Netscape is dead, it just seems like a losing brand strategy. . . unless they are trying to hurt firefox marketshare.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
.just look at US foreign policy failures over the last 50 years to understand in depth why these are NOT words of wisdom.
This is a horrible fallacy. .
He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.
This is also not often true... unless you define control as "determining how limited or non-functional something becomes". A few examples:
1) Computer Software
2) Love
3) the environment
|)
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