I agree with much of what you said, but not the part about destroying whatever software or high tech innovation our country could come up with. Unless you're talking about some country other than the United States (in which I case I apologize for the coming non sequitur), if it was MSFT's intention to do that, they failed miserably.
Apple has come up with tons of neat stuff since Bush took office. All sorts of open source projects have been very innovative and successful during that same time period. Open source is harder to qualify as being from any one country, since people from all over the world work on it, but MSFT has been singularly unsuccessful in harming or destroying it.
My former employer became so successful during the Bush administration that it was acquired by Microsoft in 2005 (no kidding; and it's been rather flat since then, AFAICT. I went to work for the competition). My current employer also became very successful during the Bush administration, so much so that it was also recently acquired. Not by MSFT, thankfully, but by a company that believes in keeping our corporate culture and our successful team both intact and in place (no relocation for us, w00t!).
I'm certain as only a former MSFT blue badge can be that MSFT *wishes* it could destroy any software innovation it doesn't create itself and can't buy, but Microsoft was far better at that kind of thing during the Clinton years than it has been during the Bush years. Not that I mean to imply Clinton was soft on Microsoft and Bush tough, or anything like that. I think Presidents Clinton and Bush have both been relatively insignificant to MSFT. Microsoft dominated so thoroughly during the Clinton years because it had previously been so good at crushing or buying competition and really did have monopoly power. That power, especially because it was abused so much and so blatantly, made Microsoft a lightning rod for all kinds of competition, open source or not, and made a lot of people just hate MSFT. I believe that by the time they understood the threat, and that it was for real, it was already too late.
Plus, as others have said, they have too much going on outside of their core business. Not that I entirely blame them for that; the writing is on the wall that someday the Office franchise won't be worth anything like what it's worth today, and even the Windows franchise will face a real drop in value from competition by Apple (completely superior to Windows) on one side and open source operating systems (improving all the time, and already better than Windows in many areas) on the other. However, I think it's fair to say that Microsoft's core business of operating systems and office productivity applications has suffered as a result of how large Microsoft has become in its attempt to be an everything company of technology. MSN. Hotmail. XBox. Hardware (granted, Microsoft makes nice keyboards and mice, but I don't think they need to do it). Probably a bunch of other things I'm not even thinking of right now. Companies in many businesses have overextended themselves and paid for it. The ones that wise up tend to dump non-core businesses and get back to their fundamentals. MSFT shows no sign at all of such wisdom so far.
If that thing were only heavy enough to actually anchor my boat, I might give it a shot. Most definitely the fugliest computer on the market, in any form factor. All I can say is "WTF were they thinking?"
Not everything is trademarkable. I hold the.org version of my domain name. Other people hold the.net and.com versions, and we all do different things with them. I don't even run a website on mine; the others do, and in a different language than mine. In cases like this, whoever got there first, got there first.
One can also make a pretty good case that being the first to trademark something doesn't mean you should have a right to the domain name:
Nissan (which was, of course, known as Datsun outside of Japan at the time Uzi Nissan opened his computer shop), tried to screw him royally and pretty much succeeded until they got to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. This case has a lot to do with I have never bought a Nissan and likely never will.
Precisely. I have a vanity domain, have held it for years, and there is nothing there but a single email address. I have never hosted a website or any other service on it, and there are doubtless some who would say that's not a legitimate use because I don't have a website there and have no intention of ever putting one there.
As for me, while I'm not really a fan of domain parking (although I'm neither an opponent), I couldn't really argue that my entirely non-monetized use of my domain is more legitimate than someone parking a domain and scraping a little advertising revenue from it. I'd probably even do that myself, except A) I'm too lazy B) My domain likely wouldn't attract much traffic except from those interested in a fish in the char family, indigenous to cool, clear mountain streams in Japan and AFAIK found nowhere else in the world, and C) I don't really want to be seen as a domain parker; there's more than a little overlap between domain parkers and spammers (speaking as a member of the anti-spam industry, thus having a front-row seat to that stuff).
In fact, a domain with no web site is regarded as highly suspicious in some circles, so there are doubtless many people who would mistake my domain as belong to a spammer at first glance.
I'm not convinced that domain parking is that much of a problem, though. Tasting is a problem because it's widely abused by spammers, and is also abused by parkers as a means of finding out which domains are good for parking. If the economic model of tasting is broken, parkers will have to pay their money and take their chances like everybody else.
The two groups that seems to be mainly bothered by parking are:
-People who wish they could register that domain. To that, I can't say much but "The parker got their first, and unless you can establish some kind of fraud (phishing, etc.,), the first person to register is the one who has the right to a domain."
-People who want the advertising dollars the parkers are getting. To them, I'd say "Build a site with content people want to look at, and you'll get those dollars."
Parked domains are really pretty invisible to me, both in my work and in my personal use of the Internet. The only time I run across them is sometimes when investigating spam, since there is some overlap between parkers and spammers. It's not all that large, though. A smart spammer will not spam links to a parked domain, lets it be nuked and stop producing income.
At a recent ICANN meeting, it was voted that ICANN will cease to refund the ICANN domain fee. The result of that will be that registrars won't refund it either, which in turn is expected to be a bullet to the heart of domain tasting.
ICANN's fee is not a lot - 20 cents (US) per year - but that is expected to be sufficient to make domain tasting unprofitable.
Bravo! I work in the email security industry, and I completely agree with you. Not only is filtering the outbound mail stream a matter of good Internet citizenship (and something a number of our ISP customers do), it's also practical. For any business, filtering the outbound can help keep your SMTP hosts off of blacklists. In the case of businesses with confidential information that could be stolen (which is almost all of them), it can also be a practical measure to boost IT security.
You're spot-on about censorship, too. Preventing the sending of outbound spam by zombies is not censorship for the simple reason that it is not mail that the owners of those computers want to send; it is mail that is being sent without their permission via theft of their resources and service. As for people who are deliberately spamming, one could argue that it's censorship, but the ToS of pretty much any ISP forbid spamming. People who want to be allowed to spam should not sign up with ISPs that forbid it; if they do so anyway and the ISP enforces its ToS through measures including outbound spam filtering and suspending or terminating the spammer's account, that's tough.
If only the EFF could get on the right side of the spam issue. They do so much good work in so many areas, but tend to wrongly take the side of spammers, somehow viewing it as censorship. That is wrong: there's no freedom of speech in spamming. People can say anything they want by taking out a billboard, or hosting a website, or running a blog. That's freedom of speech, and I support it, even if I think the message is a load of crap. The freedom to present a message should not be dependent on the content of the message (with reasonable exceptions, like the classic "Shouting 'fire!' in a crowed theater" example). Spamming is like going to the store, stealing a can of spray paint, then kicking down my front door and spray painting your message on my living room wall. That's not freedom of speech; it's theft, vandalism, and breaking and entering. So is spamming.
You haven't been with GNOME forever, then, and maybe not even very long, as these things are reckoned:) Enlightenment was the original GNOME window manager, back in the day when Rasterman worked closely with the GNOME project. I started using GNOME in the late 1990s, and it was most definitely using E at that time. See Miguel's page on the early history of GNOME here:
E was later replaced by Sawfish, which I never cared for. I guess a lot of other people didn't either, because sometime in 2002, after I'd stopped using GNOME, Sawfish was replaced with Metacity.
Nice memories of those old days when Linux was still an adventure. Cheers!
Almost five years would mean they were definitely not using Metacity when I stopped using GNOME:) I started using GNOME in the late 1990s and had moved on to other things by the time they migrated from Sawfish to Metacity.
They were using Sawfish as late as September, 2002, although there is a Metacity reference from May of that same year. It sounds like that was the transition period, although I can't be sure; I haven't found any really clear GNOME history timeline so far. I know when I switched from GNOME to KDE, though: it was in early 2002 when KDE 3.0 was in late beta or release candidate status, and not too long before the official release. Before that I was still using GNOME and Sawfish was still the default window manager, although I usually changed it to back to Enlightenment, which I continued to prefer even after Rasterman had become very distant from the GNOME project.
I'm not currently running an ancient distro (no more security patches is a deal breaker), but as recently as 2004 I was running Debian 3.x and I do have some moderately old CDs, such as Red Hat 7.0 (Japanese edition) and I may still have the TurboLinux knockoff of Red Hat 4,2, which they released under the TurboLinux name before they actually did their own distro. I had some 2.x FreeBSD CDs around as well, although I may have dumped some of that really old stuff.
First of all, GNOME is not a window manager. It is a complete desktop environment. When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again. The point being, you can use a number of WMs with GNOME; it is not, itself, a window manager.
Low cruft? Anything that is a complete desktop environment probably doesn't meet most people's definition of low cruft, but if there is one that makes that cut in the free software world, I'd vote for XFCE (I'm a KDE user, and neither KDE nor GNOME come anywhere near low cruft in my book; XFCE is reasonably low cruft, although you also give up some things to get there; one user's cruft is another user's indispensable feature. YMMV).
If you really want low cruft, though, you need to really run just a window manager. Fluxbox and IceWM are a couple of very good choices in that area. They really are low cruft and they are also very, very fast. Of course, unless you truly are willing to trade a lot of features for speed, you may find yourself wishing for a bit more cruft after a while.
Is this new stuff going to slow it down? Yeah, maybe. OTOH, they may make tuning improvements in other areas to offset it. Of course, GNOME is already slow [1], so you may not notice an incremental slowdown. KDE is slow, too (especially KDE 4; having tried it, I put it back on the shelf to wait for 4.1, and went back to the 3.5 tree).
[1] Compared to faster things like XFCE, or even faster things, like $WINDOW_MANAGER_OF_YOUR_CHOICE, but still seems relatively responsive compared to certain proprietary systems.
You're trying to create a controversy where none exists.
The essence of your argument is "Microsoft or $PROPRIETARY_TOOLKIT_VENDOR has a single licensing model, regardless of what you plan to do with the software, while Trolltech has a flexible licensing model (if you want to write Free/Open Source software, you can use GPL QT; if you want to write proprietary software, you need to buy a QT license), and therefore $PROPRIETARY_TOOLKIT_VENDOR is superior." That holds about as much water as a sieve.
It also claims that "Trolltech's current licensing scheme attempts to set them up as the toll collector for software development on Linux." That is simply untrue. Trolltech's licensing scheme goes like this:
-If you want to write proprietary software, you need to buy a proprietary license. There are no runtime fees, royalties, or other costs for desktop systems. -If you want to write Free/Open Source, you can use GPL QT. -If you're doing embedded systems development, you may need distribution license
None of this is in any way different from what you get with other proprietary toolkits or compilers, with the exception that Free software developers have the option of using GPL QT. Neither Microsoft nor any other proprietary vendor that I'm aware of even offer you the option of using their toolkit for free if you want to write [Ff]ree software, let alone offering you their toolkit under the GPL.
People who use QT to write proprietary software for Linux (does anyone do that at all, let alone successfully?) are not up the creek and aren't going to be. Why do you think Nokia bought Trolltech? Number one reason: They won't need to buy licenses for embedded development, but any Nokia competitor that uses QT will still have to. Advantage Nokia.
The overwhelming majority of QT development is done on Linux, is done as FOSS (and is mostly KDE apps), so the acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia is going to mean absolutely nothing to any desktop systems developers, regardless of whether they are writing Free of proprietary software.
The bottom line is that it's going to be business as usual for anyone using QT to develop FOSS desktop apps, and it's going to be business as usual for anyone using QT to develop proprietary apps. I don't expect to see anything change for embedded development either. If Nokia made it a PITA for embedded developers to continue using QT, they'd just all drop it for something else, and that would not be in Nokia's best interests.
However, even if it did inconvenience proprietary developers on Linux (or other platforms), so what? The central goal of the FOSS movement is to encourage more Free software, not to encourage more proprietary software. GTK has nothing over QT in that area; it's not even as good as QT in that area. GTK does nothing to encourage Free licensing other than to be [Ff]ree itself. QT, on the other hand, may tend to encourage Free licensing by saying "If you don't want to use a FOSS license, you have to pay us for QT."
The copyright holder is still the copyright holder. He/she can remove the license whenever he/she wants.
While that is true going forward, it does not affect versions of the software that have already been released under the GPL. The best (or at least most well-known) example of this is SSH. SSH is not proprietary software, but it was originally released under a free license. When SSH was taken private, the OpenSSH project took the last free version of SSH 1.x source code, cleaned it up, made it portable, added features (including SSH 2 support and SFTP), and most importantly, kept it Free.
It's also worth noting that OpenSSH today is far more popular than its proprietary cousin, so his attempt to revoke the GPL on already released versions of his project is not only doomed to failure by virtue of the fact that the GPL is irrevocable (clearly spelled out in the license; if you license code to me under the GPL, you can't change your mind later. It's mine to use, modify, and distribute under the GPL in perpetuity, so long as I remain compliant with the GPL. And of course, anyone who receives it from me also has that right to use and redistribute it), it is also quite likely to make his software relatively unpopular. If he takes it proprietary and anyone actually uses it for anything, someone will created a Free fork (and probably already has), which will become the standard version of the software, while his is relegated to a relative niche market, like proprietary SSH.
Actually, no, they won't. A search warrant has to specify what they're looking for. To get it, they have to tell a judge what that is, and justify why they should be allowed to search your house. The justification part isn't so tough, but let's say that a person is arrested for, say, stealing a car. If they could get a warrant to search his house, they'd have to say what they were looking for and how it was related to the crime with which he was charged. They might be able to get one, to look for stolen car parts or whole cars. However, if the warrant said "Stolen cars or parts thereof" and they found a kilo brick of coke sitting in his end table and came back and charged him with possession, the coke would not be allowed as evidence because it would be outside the scope of the warrant.
Speaking as someone in the security industry and very closely involved with anti-phishing efforts, I have to say that the million dollars and the team of 10 wouldn't do you much good, because the phishers are not only not in the United States or Canada, where they would be relatively easy to apprehend, but are almost all in Russia, Romania, and other eastern European countries where even catching them, let alone getting them prosecuted is a much more difficult proposition. Extradition? Forget it.
The only way a team like that might be effective is if it were a hit squad, but even then, there are just too many phishers to assassinate.
LE has a lot more than 10 people working on this and spends far more than a million dollars a year on it, and look how hard it is to get arrests, prosecutions, and convictions (there have been some, but they are hard to get), what makes you think you could do better with only 10 people, a million bucks, and no stated LE experience, and meet all the evidentiary requirements to get a prosecution and a conviction? You'll pardon me if I take your claim with quite a few grains of salt.
I've personally met FBI special agents who work on this area. Believe me, they know far more about this than you do, and have resources your hypothetical million dollars couldn't get you. Heck, that million bucks would just cover the salary and benefits of that team of ten (assuming they work cheap; it wouldn't cover salary and benefits for 10 people who make what I make), without even getting into any external costs of forensic lab services, equipment purchases, etc. And even if you did do better research work than the FBI, good luck convincing an eastern European police agency to follow it up after you email them about it.
Exactly. Every CD I've purchased in the last five years has been an indy, bought directly from the artist, usually at a live venue. Go back a couple more years and you can find some small labels like Alligator Records in my purchases, but no major label stuff. All the major label stuff I have was purchased a long time ago, and was recorded long enough ago that it's all CD reissue of stuff that was originally recorded on vinyl.
Why is this? It's not just about wanting to directly support artists I enjoy and see them get paid for their work (the rips of which go only to my iPod and are not passed around), but because the major labels aren't selling anything I want. I don't download it for free, either. They just don't have anything I want that I haven't already bought. If the industry is really collapsing, it's doing so because it's failing to produce enough product that enough people are willing to pay for. History is filled with businesses, or entire industries, that failed for this reason.
Just as many of the greatest innovations in computers have been made by a couple people working out of a garage, the greatest creative work in music comes from there, too. Not from big record companies creating Brittany clones.
Like you said, good riddance. If the entire music "industry" actually does collapse, I'll still be able to get the music I want just fine.
Are you suggesting that it's better to change the color of a car with brush or roller paint?:-)
Seriously, though, I do run OS X. I do need an office suite but don't/won't use MS Office for Mac, with the exception of Entourage (which is not very good, but for all its faults is better than anything else for dealing with an Exchange server from a Mac). I'm currently using OpenOffice.org. My experience with Koffice on Linux has been that while it looks nicer than OO.o and is much, much faster, it's file import capabilities for MS Office files are vastly inferior to those of OO.o. If Koffice can solve that problem, I think there will definitely be a place for Koffice on OS X.
If they can take that a step farther and make Kontact work with Exchange servers, that will let me chuck Entourage as well. I see the ability to use KDE on a Mac as a very positive development.
Yes, this is just where Sun wants to go, plus what iabervon said about increasing sales of existing Sun products. While Sun has an awful lot of software out there (more of it under open source or Free licenses than ever), Sun remains primarily a hardware and services company like IBM. IBM uses Linux and other Free and open source software to help it sell hardware and services while simultaneously saving money on development. One of the things IBM has but Sun doesn't is an Enterprise database (not trolling for arguments about whether or not MySQL is an enterprise DB; it's good enough for most uses in most businesses, and where it's weak, Sun can help strengthen it).
I'm sure Sun hopes to get leverage out of this to use against MS SQL Server and Oracle, since they'll be able to offer a good DB and one-stop shopping ('We ship you the box, with all the software installed, and we support it all in one place. No "He said/She said" fingerpointing, just a single phone number to call", or so I expect the marketing pitch to run). If Sun does this right - yes, that may be an "if" of non-small proportions - I expect it will drive their sales of both hardware and professional services, plus give them more street cred in the open source and Free Software communities. Which may in turn again drive more sales. After all, no matter how clumsy Sun has sometimes been in its relationship with Free software, most of us have still always thought Sun gear was cool.
That's an interesting point, and I'm sure he has trained just as hard as sprinters who have their natural limbs. I'm sure he's a very good athlete by any measure, and I doubt I could do as well if faced with similar challenges. However, the main question is not whether or not he trained hard; the main question is whether or not the prosthetics he's using confer an unfair advantage, and there appears to be a strong enough case (note: it doesn't have to be air-tight, just strong enough) that they do. Indeed, the way competitions are judged, there would probably have to be an air-tight case that they *don't* confer an advantage, and that would be difficult to establish.
Another question (the above is the main one, but not the only one) that also has to be taken into account is that even if the prosthetics are found to give less advantage than the IAAF believes, or even if they are found to give none at all, that's only for the current state of the art. In other words, there's a great big "YET" attached to all this. For all the great recent advances in prosthetics, that is still a science in its infancy. 10 years from now, we may see prosthetics that no sprinter with natural limbs can beat. If they allow it now, then there's a precedent that *some* prosthetics are acceptable, even if they may give some level of advantage over natural limbs. Once that precedent is established, they will be faced thereafter with having to decide which prosthetics are acceptable and which are not, or with someday revoking it, precedent or not.
Additionally, as prosthetics improve to the point where there is no question as to whether they confer an advantage, because the advantage becomes so large it is no longer debatable, there will be demands from athletes with natural limbs to also use them. At that point, they will have to rule that either everyone can, or again, revoke all precedent and say that no one can. There would be a firestorm of protest if they told athletes who had previously been allowed to use prosthetics that "Sorry, you can't do that anymore." And probably a lawsuit to overturn the decision.
Taking all of these things together, I believe the correct decision on prosthetics for any sport where prosthetics may either now or in the future confer an advantage over athletes not using prosthetics, that prosthetics not be allowed. (Sorry, shooters, no bionic eyes.)
Viewed another way, prosthetics that increase performance - whether or not they can yet do so, or do in this specific case - would be no different essentially from performance-enhancing drugs. If it's OK to us a prosthetic that confers a physical advantage, then it's also OK to use steroids. Or it not one, then not the other, either.
I realize this may not be easy to accept for athletes who have lost limbs or were born without them, and it's certainly not going to give anyone a warm fuzzy to have tell a person with no legs "Sorry, you can't participate in this event," but sometimes the fair thing doesn't give warm fuzzies.
I was entertaining the idea that you might not be a troll until I got to the part about "no stupid replaceable battery." I also think the MB Air is very nice, but I'm also very glad my MBP has a replaceable battery. I have two for the MBP, and more than that for my Thinkpad. More than once, I've wished my iPod had a replaceable battery.
I also with it had more than one USB port, but that's a quibble. I can live with a USB hub, and have one plugged into my MBP right now. Overall, I think the MB Air is a very nice machine, and after a closer look, may get one for my wife. It'd be ideal for carrying around campus and is lighter than the Thinkpad she has now. Then I could take her Tpad and put Linux on it, Muuuahahahaha!
And if you want something really good, try sugar cane juice. It somehow has a slightly lime-like tang to it, and is delicious on the rocks. I first had it when I was living in Saigon, and not much beats a glass of freshly pressed sugar cane juice on a hot day.
Almost anything is better than corn. Corn is only popular in the US because corn farming has a powerful lobby. Sugarcane and practically anything else commonly used to produce ethanol is better than corn.
Spot-on. Too much fat can have negative effects on cholesterol levels and heart health, but eating fat doesn't make you fat. A calorie from fat is not more fattening than, say, a calorie from fish. However, fat does have a lot of calories in it; because fast-food tends to be high in fat, it packs a lot calories, and eating a lot more calories than needed will cause weight gain. The sugar only makes it worse, or course. Comedians tell jokes about people getting a double quarter-pounder with cheese and a super-sized fries, then ordering a Diet Coke with it, but the Diet Coke is actually a pretty smart thing to do.
As for gaming making people fat, all I can say is "What's he on?" Insofar as I remember when the original Pong came out, I wasn't a gamer as a child for the simple reason that there weren't any game consoles until I was in my teens already. However, I was an avid reader and spent at least as much time reading as avid gamers spend playing video games, and reading is definitely far more sedentary than gaming. I know a lot of gamers and participate occasionally myself. Gamers move around a lot more than readers do, and good games can definitely get your heart rate up. Using a Wii is practically exercise:p Despite the sedentary hobby, I was never overweight as a child, not even a little bit.
So, I spent at least as much time at a sedentary activity when I was a kid as today's gamers do, but I wasn't fat. In fact, fat kids were just plain rare when I was in grade school. Now, they're pretty thick on the ground, so to speak. What was different back then? A couple things that I can think of: I (and most kids) ate way less fast good, junk food, and other prepared food than kids today, and even junk food wasn't as bad. Drinks and other junk foods that used sugar in those days no use high-fructose corn syrup, which is worse than sugar.
I know that a CEO has to promote his company, it's part of his job, but a statement like "Gaming is what makes kids fat" is just embarrassing.
Slashdot Mirror
To summarize that (all of which I agree with), 2008 will be looked back upon as the year Microsoft jumped the shark.
I agree with much of what you said, but not the part about destroying whatever software or high tech innovation our country could come up with. Unless you're talking about some country other than the United States (in which I case I apologize for the coming non sequitur), if it was MSFT's intention to do that, they failed miserably.
Apple has come up with tons of neat stuff since Bush took office. All sorts of open source projects have been very innovative and successful during that same time period. Open source is harder to qualify as being from any one country, since people from all over the world work on it, but MSFT has been singularly unsuccessful in harming or destroying it.
My former employer became so successful during the Bush administration that it was acquired by Microsoft in 2005 (no kidding; and it's been rather flat since then, AFAICT. I went to work for the competition). My current employer also became very successful during the Bush administration, so much so that it was also recently acquired. Not by MSFT, thankfully, but by a company that believes in keeping our corporate culture and our successful team both intact and in place (no relocation for us, w00t!).
I'm certain as only a former MSFT blue badge can be that MSFT *wishes* it could destroy any software innovation it doesn't create itself and can't buy, but Microsoft was far better at that kind of thing during the Clinton years than it has been during the Bush years. Not that I mean to imply Clinton was soft on Microsoft and Bush tough, or anything like that. I think Presidents Clinton and Bush have both been relatively insignificant to MSFT. Microsoft dominated so thoroughly during the Clinton years because it had previously been so good at crushing or buying competition and really did have monopoly power. That power, especially because it was abused so much and so blatantly, made Microsoft a lightning rod for all kinds of competition, open source or not, and made a lot of people just hate MSFT. I believe that by the time they understood the threat, and that it was for real, it was already too late.
Plus, as others have said, they have too much going on outside of their core business. Not that I entirely blame them for that; the writing is on the wall that someday the Office franchise won't be worth anything like what it's worth today, and even the Windows franchise will face a real drop in value from competition by Apple (completely superior to Windows) on one side and open source operating systems (improving all the time, and already better than Windows in many areas) on the other. However, I think it's fair to say that Microsoft's core business of operating systems and office productivity applications has suffered as a result of how large Microsoft has become in its attempt to be an everything company of technology. MSN. Hotmail. XBox. Hardware (granted, Microsoft makes nice keyboards and mice, but I don't think they need to do it). Probably a bunch of other things I'm not even thinking of right now. Companies in many businesses have overextended themselves and paid for it. The ones that wise up tend to dump non-core businesses and get back to their fundamentals. MSFT shows no sign at all of such wisdom so far.
If that thing were only heavy enough to actually anchor my boat, I might give it a shot. Most definitely the fugliest computer on the market, in any form factor. All I can say is "WTF were they thinking?"
Not everything is trademarkable. I hold the .org version of my domain name. Other people hold the .net and .com versions, and we all do different things with them. I don't even run a website on mine; the others do, and in a different language than mine. In cases like this, whoever got there first, got there first.
One can also make a pretty good case that being the first to trademark something doesn't mean you should have a right to the domain name:
http://www.nissan.com/Digest/The_Story.php
Nissan (which was, of course, known as Datsun outside of Japan at the time Uzi Nissan opened his computer shop), tried to screw him royally and pretty much succeeded until they got to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. This case has a lot to do with I have never bought a Nissan and likely never will.
Precisely. I have a vanity domain, have held it for years, and there is nothing there but a single email address. I have never hosted a website or any other service on it, and there are doubtless some who would say that's not a legitimate use because I don't have a website there and have no intention of ever putting one there.
As for me, while I'm not really a fan of domain parking (although I'm neither an opponent), I couldn't really argue that my entirely non-monetized use of my domain is more legitimate than someone parking a domain and scraping a little advertising revenue from it. I'd probably even do that myself, except A) I'm too lazy B) My domain likely wouldn't attract much traffic except from those interested in a fish in the char family, indigenous to cool, clear mountain streams in Japan and AFAIK found nowhere else in the world, and C) I don't really want to be seen as a domain parker; there's more than a little overlap between domain parkers and spammers (speaking as a member of the anti-spam industry, thus having a front-row seat to that stuff).
In fact, a domain with no web site is regarded as highly suspicious in some circles, so there are doubtless many people who would mistake my domain as belong to a spammer at first glance.
I'm not convinced that domain parking is that much of a problem, though. Tasting is a problem because it's widely abused by spammers, and is also abused by parkers as a means of finding out which domains are good for parking. If the economic model of tasting is broken, parkers will have to pay their money and take their chances like everybody else.
The two groups that seems to be mainly bothered by parking are:
-People who wish they could register that domain. To that, I can't say much but "The parker got their first, and unless you can establish some kind of fraud (phishing, etc.,), the first person to register is the one who has the right to a domain."
-People who want the advertising dollars the parkers are getting. To them, I'd say "Build a site with content people want to look at, and you'll get those dollars."
Parked domains are really pretty invisible to me, both in my work and in my personal use of the Internet. The only time I run across them is sometimes when investigating spam, since there is some overlap between parkers and spammers. It's not all that large, though. A smart spammer will not spam links to a parked domain, lets it be nuked and stop producing income.
At a recent ICANN meeting, it was voted that ICANN will cease to refund the ICANN domain fee. The result of that will be that registrars won't refund it either, which in turn is expected to be a bullet to the heart of domain tasting.
ICANN's fee is not a lot - 20 cents (US) per year - but that is expected to be sufficient to make domain tasting unprofitable.
Article here: http://www.circleid.com/posts/81299_domain_tasting_ends/
...Windows Live $microsoft_product_du_jour.
/. lameness filter wasn't so LAME.)
(Variable name would be in CAPS if the
Bravo! I work in the email security industry, and I completely agree with you. Not only is filtering the outbound mail stream a matter of good Internet citizenship (and something a number of our ISP customers do), it's also practical. For any business, filtering the outbound can help keep your SMTP hosts off of blacklists. In the case of businesses with confidential information that could be stolen (which is almost all of them), it can also be a practical measure to boost IT security.
You're spot-on about censorship, too. Preventing the sending of outbound spam by zombies is not censorship for the simple reason that it is not mail that the owners of those computers want to send; it is mail that is being sent without their permission via theft of their resources and service. As for people who are deliberately spamming, one could argue that it's censorship, but the ToS of pretty much any ISP forbid spamming. People who want to be allowed to spam should not sign up with ISPs that forbid it; if they do so anyway and the ISP enforces its ToS through measures including outbound spam filtering and suspending or terminating the spammer's account, that's tough.
If only the EFF could get on the right side of the spam issue. They do so much good work in so many areas, but tend to wrongly take the side of spammers, somehow viewing it as censorship. That is wrong: there's no freedom of speech in spamming. People can say anything they want by taking out a billboard, or hosting a website, or running a blog. That's freedom of speech, and I support it, even if I think the message is a load of crap. The freedom to present a message should not be dependent on the content of the message (with reasonable exceptions, like the classic "Shouting 'fire!' in a crowed theater" example). Spamming is like going to the store, stealing a can of spray paint, then kicking down my front door and spray painting your message on my living room wall. That's not freedom of speech; it's theft, vandalism, and breaking and entering. So is spamming.
P.S. I never used Red Hat 9, I chucked it for Debian when RH 8.0 came out and I hated Blue Curve :)
You haven't been with GNOME forever, then, and maybe not even very long, as these things are reckoned :) Enlightenment was the original GNOME window manager, back in the day when Rasterman worked closely with the GNOME project. I started using GNOME in the late 1990s, and it was most definitely using E at that time. See Miguel's page on the early history of GNOME here:
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html
E was later replaced by Sawfish, which I never cared for. I guess a lot of other people didn't either, because sometime in 2002, after I'd stopped using GNOME, Sawfish was replaced with Metacity.
Nice memories of those old days when Linux was still an adventure. Cheers!
Almost five years would mean they were definitely not using Metacity when I stopped using GNOME :) I started using GNOME in the late 1990s and had moved on to other things by the time they migrated from Sawfish to Metacity.
According to this page:
http://developer.gnome.org/news/
They were using Sawfish as late as September, 2002, although there is a Metacity reference from May of that same year. It sounds like that was the transition period, although I can't be sure; I haven't found any really clear GNOME history timeline so far. I know when I switched from GNOME to KDE, though: it was in early 2002 when KDE 3.0 was in late beta or release candidate status, and not too long before the official release. Before that I was still using GNOME and Sawfish was still the default window manager, although I usually changed it to back to Enlightenment, which I continued to prefer even after Rasterman had become very distant from the GNOME project.
I'm not currently running an ancient distro (no more security patches is a deal breaker), but as recently as 2004 I was running Debian 3.x and I do have some moderately old CDs, such as Red Hat 7.0 (Japanese edition) and I may still have the TurboLinux knockoff of Red Hat 4,2, which they released under the TurboLinux name before they actually did their own distro. I had some 2.x FreeBSD CDs around as well, although I may have dumped some of that really old stuff.
First of all, GNOME is not a window manager. It is a complete desktop environment. When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again. The point being, you can use a number of WMs with GNOME; it is not, itself, a window manager.
Low cruft? Anything that is a complete desktop environment probably doesn't meet most people's definition of low cruft, but if there is one that makes that cut in the free software world, I'd vote for XFCE (I'm a KDE user, and neither KDE nor GNOME come anywhere near low cruft in my book; XFCE is reasonably low cruft, although you also give up some things to get there; one user's cruft is another user's indispensable feature. YMMV).
If you really want low cruft, though, you need to really run just a window manager. Fluxbox and IceWM are a couple of very good choices in that area. They really are low cruft and they are also very, very fast. Of course, unless you truly are willing to trade a lot of features for speed, you may find yourself wishing for a bit more cruft after a while.
Is this new stuff going to slow it down? Yeah, maybe. OTOH, they may make tuning improvements in other areas to offset it. Of course, GNOME is already slow [1], so you may not notice an incremental slowdown. KDE is slow, too (especially KDE 4; having tried it, I put it back on the shelf to wait for 4.1, and went back to the 3.5 tree).
[1] Compared to faster things like XFCE, or even faster things, like $WINDOW_MANAGER_OF_YOUR_CHOICE, but still seems relatively responsive compared to certain proprietary systems.
You're trying to create a controversy where none exists.
The essence of your argument is "Microsoft or $PROPRIETARY_TOOLKIT_VENDOR has a single licensing model, regardless of what you plan to do with the software, while Trolltech has a flexible licensing model (if you want to write Free/Open Source software, you can use GPL QT; if you want to write proprietary software, you need to buy a QT license), and therefore $PROPRIETARY_TOOLKIT_VENDOR is superior." That holds about as much water as a sieve.
It also claims that "Trolltech's current licensing scheme attempts to set them up as the toll collector for software development on Linux." That is simply untrue. Trolltech's licensing scheme goes like this:
-If you want to write proprietary software, you need to buy a proprietary license. There are no runtime fees, royalties, or other costs for desktop systems.
-If you want to write Free/Open Source, you can use GPL QT.
-If you're doing embedded systems development, you may need distribution license
For further reading: http://trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/licensing/qtlicensing
None of this is in any way different from what you get with other proprietary toolkits or compilers, with the exception that Free software developers have the option of using GPL QT. Neither Microsoft nor any other proprietary vendor that I'm aware of even offer you the option of using their toolkit for free if you want to write [Ff]ree software, let alone offering you their toolkit under the GPL.
People who use QT to write proprietary software for Linux (does anyone do that at all, let alone successfully?) are not up the creek and aren't going to be. Why do you think Nokia bought Trolltech? Number one reason: They won't need to buy licenses for embedded development, but any Nokia competitor that uses QT will still have to. Advantage Nokia.
The overwhelming majority of QT development is done on Linux, is done as FOSS (and is mostly KDE apps), so the acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia is going to mean absolutely nothing to any desktop systems developers, regardless of whether they are writing Free of proprietary software.
The bottom line is that it's going to be business as usual for anyone using QT to develop FOSS desktop apps, and it's going to be business as usual for anyone using QT to develop proprietary apps. I don't expect to see anything change for embedded development either. If Nokia made it a PITA for embedded developers to continue using QT, they'd just all drop it for something else, and that would not be in Nokia's best interests.
However, even if it did inconvenience proprietary developers on Linux (or other platforms), so what? The central goal of the FOSS movement is to encourage more Free software, not to encourage more proprietary software. GTK has nothing over QT in that area; it's not even as good as QT in that area. GTK does nothing to encourage Free licensing other than to be [Ff]ree itself. QT, on the other hand, may tend to encourage Free licensing by saying "If you don't want to use a FOSS license, you have to pay us for QT."
The copyright holder is still the copyright holder. He/she can remove the license whenever he/she wants.
While that is true going forward, it does not affect versions of the software that have already been released under the GPL. The best (or at least most well-known) example of this is SSH. SSH is not proprietary software, but it was originally released under a free license. When SSH was taken private, the OpenSSH project took the last free version of SSH 1.x source code, cleaned it up, made it portable, added features (including SSH 2 support and SFTP), and most importantly, kept it Free.
For more info, see the OpenSSHsite.
It's also worth noting that OpenSSH today is far more popular than its proprietary cousin, so his attempt to revoke the GPL on already released versions of his project is not only doomed to failure by virtue of the fact that the GPL is irrevocable (clearly spelled out in the license; if you license code to me under the GPL, you can't change your mind later. It's mine to use, modify, and distribute under the GPL in perpetuity, so long as I remain compliant with the GPL. And of course, anyone who receives it from me also has that right to use and redistribute it), it is also quite likely to make his software relatively unpopular. If he takes it proprietary and anyone actually uses it for anything, someone will created a Free fork (and probably already has), which will become the standard version of the software, while his is relegated to a relative niche market, like proprietary SSH.
Actually, no, they won't. A search warrant has to specify what they're looking for. To get it, they have to tell a judge what that is, and justify why they should be allowed to search your house. The justification part isn't so tough, but let's say that a person is arrested for, say, stealing a car. If they could get a warrant to search his house, they'd have to say what they were looking for and how it was related to the crime with which he was charged. They might be able to get one, to look for stolen car parts or whole cars. However, if the warrant said "Stolen cars or parts thereof" and they found a kilo brick of coke sitting in his end table and came back and charged him with possession, the coke would not be allowed as evidence because it would be outside the scope of the warrant.
Speaking as someone in the security industry and very closely involved with anti-phishing efforts, I have to say that the million dollars and the team of 10 wouldn't do you much good, because the phishers are not only not in the United States or Canada, where they would be relatively easy to apprehend, but are almost all in Russia, Romania, and other eastern European countries where even catching them, let alone getting them prosecuted is a much more difficult proposition. Extradition? Forget it.
The only way a team like that might be effective is if it were a hit squad, but even then, there are just too many phishers to assassinate.
LE has a lot more than 10 people working on this and spends far more than a million dollars a year on it, and look how hard it is to get arrests, prosecutions, and convictions (there have been some, but they are hard to get), what makes you think you could do better with only 10 people, a million bucks, and no stated LE experience, and meet all the evidentiary requirements to get a prosecution and a conviction? You'll pardon me if I take your claim with quite a few grains of salt.
I've personally met FBI special agents who work on this area. Believe me, they know far more about this than you do, and have resources your hypothetical million dollars couldn't get you. Heck, that million bucks would just cover the salary and benefits of that team of ten (assuming they work cheap; it wouldn't cover salary and benefits for 10 people who make what I make), without even getting into any external costs of forensic lab services, equipment purchases, etc. And even if you did do better research work than the FBI, good luck convincing an eastern European police agency to follow it up after you email them about it.
Exactly. Every CD I've purchased in the last five years has been an indy, bought directly from the artist, usually at a live venue. Go back a couple more years and you can find some small labels like Alligator Records in my purchases, but no major label stuff. All the major label stuff I have was purchased a long time ago, and was recorded long enough ago that it's all CD reissue of stuff that was originally recorded on vinyl.
Why is this? It's not just about wanting to directly support artists I enjoy and see them get paid for their work (the rips of which go only to my iPod and are not passed around), but because the major labels aren't selling anything I want. I don't download it for free, either. They just don't have anything I want that I haven't already bought. If the industry is really collapsing, it's doing so because it's failing to produce enough product that enough people are willing to pay for. History is filled with businesses, or entire industries, that failed for this reason.
Just as many of the greatest innovations in computers have been made by a couple people working out of a garage, the greatest creative work in music comes from there, too. Not from big record companies creating Brittany clones.
Like you said, good riddance. If the entire music "industry" actually does collapse, I'll still be able to get the music I want just fine.
Are you suggesting that it's better to change the color of a car with brush or roller paint? :-)
Seriously, though, I do run OS X. I do need an office suite but don't/won't use MS Office for Mac, with the exception of Entourage (which is not very good, but for all its faults is better than anything else for dealing with an Exchange server from a Mac). I'm currently using OpenOffice.org. My experience with Koffice on Linux has been that while it looks nicer than OO.o and is much, much faster, it's file import capabilities for MS Office files are vastly inferior to those of OO.o. If Koffice can solve that problem, I think there will definitely be a place for Koffice on OS X.
If they can take that a step farther and make Kontact work with Exchange servers, that will let me chuck Entourage as well. I see the ability to use KDE on a Mac as a very positive development.
Yes, this is just where Sun wants to go, plus what iabervon said about increasing sales of existing Sun products. While Sun has an awful lot of software out there (more of it under open source or Free licenses than ever), Sun remains primarily a hardware and services company like IBM. IBM uses Linux and other Free and open source software to help it sell hardware and services while simultaneously saving money on development. One of the things IBM has but Sun doesn't is an Enterprise database (not trolling for arguments about whether or not MySQL is an enterprise DB; it's good enough for most uses in most businesses, and where it's weak, Sun can help strengthen it).
I'm sure Sun hopes to get leverage out of this to use against MS SQL Server and Oracle, since they'll be able to offer a good DB and one-stop shopping ('We ship you the box, with all the software installed, and we support it all in one place. No "He said/She said" fingerpointing, just a single phone number to call", or so I expect the marketing pitch to run). If Sun does this right - yes, that may be an "if" of non-small proportions - I expect it will drive their sales of both hardware and professional services, plus give them more street cred in the open source and Free Software communities. Which may in turn again drive more sales. After all, no matter how clumsy Sun has sometimes been in its relationship with Free software, most of us have still always thought Sun gear was cool.
That's an interesting point, and I'm sure he has trained just as hard as sprinters who have their natural limbs. I'm sure he's a very good athlete by any measure, and I doubt I could do as well if faced with similar challenges. However, the main question is not whether or not he trained hard; the main question is whether or not the prosthetics he's using confer an unfair advantage, and there appears to be a strong enough case (note: it doesn't have to be air-tight, just strong enough) that they do. Indeed, the way competitions are judged, there would probably have to be an air-tight case that they *don't* confer an advantage, and that would be difficult to establish.
Another question (the above is the main one, but not the only one) that also has to be taken into account is that even if the prosthetics are found to give less advantage than the IAAF believes, or even if they are found to give none at all, that's only for the current state of the art. In other words, there's a great big "YET" attached to all this. For all the great recent advances in prosthetics, that is still a science in its infancy. 10 years from now, we may see prosthetics that no sprinter with natural limbs can beat. If they allow it now, then there's a precedent that *some* prosthetics are acceptable, even if they may give some level of advantage over natural limbs. Once that precedent is established, they will be faced thereafter with having to decide which prosthetics are acceptable and which are not, or with someday revoking it, precedent or not.
Additionally, as prosthetics improve to the point where there is no question as to whether they confer an advantage, because the advantage becomes so large it is no longer debatable, there will be demands from athletes with natural limbs to also use them. At that point, they will have to rule that either everyone can, or again, revoke all precedent and say that no one can. There would be a firestorm of protest if they told athletes who had previously been allowed to use prosthetics that "Sorry, you can't do that anymore." And probably a lawsuit to overturn the decision.
Taking all of these things together, I believe the correct decision on prosthetics for any sport where prosthetics may either now or in the future confer an advantage over athletes not using prosthetics, that prosthetics not be allowed. (Sorry, shooters, no bionic eyes.)
Viewed another way, prosthetics that increase performance - whether or not they can yet do so, or do in this specific case - would be no different essentially from performance-enhancing drugs. If it's OK to us a prosthetic that confers a physical advantage, then it's also OK to use steroids. Or it not one, then not the other, either.
I realize this may not be easy to accept for athletes who have lost limbs or were born without them, and it's certainly not going to give anyone a warm fuzzy to have tell a person with no legs "Sorry, you can't participate in this event," but sometimes the fair thing doesn't give warm fuzzies.
I was entertaining the idea that you might not be a troll until I got to the part about "no stupid replaceable battery." I also think the MB Air is very nice, but I'm also very glad my MBP has a replaceable battery. I have two for the MBP, and more than that for my Thinkpad. More than once, I've wished my iPod had a replaceable battery.
I also with it had more than one USB port, but that's a quibble. I can live with a USB hub, and have one plugged into my MBP right now. Overall, I think the MB Air is a very nice machine, and after a closer look, may get one for my wife. It'd be ideal for carrying around campus and is lighter than the Thinkpad she has now. Then I could take her Tpad and put Linux on it, Muuuahahahaha!
And if you want something really good, try sugar cane juice. It somehow has a slightly lime-like tang to it, and is delicious on the rocks. I first had it when I was living in Saigon, and not much beats a glass of freshly pressed sugar cane juice on a hot day.
Almost anything is better than corn. Corn is only popular in the US because corn farming has a powerful lobby. Sugarcane and practically anything else commonly used to produce ethanol is better than corn.
Spot-on. Too much fat can have negative effects on cholesterol levels and heart health, but eating fat doesn't make you fat. A calorie from fat is not more fattening than, say, a calorie from fish. However, fat does have a lot of calories in it; because fast-food tends to be high in fat, it packs a lot calories, and eating a lot more calories than needed will cause weight gain. The sugar only makes it worse, or course. Comedians tell jokes about people getting a double quarter-pounder with cheese and a super-sized fries, then ordering a Diet Coke with it, but the Diet Coke is actually a pretty smart thing to do.
:p Despite the sedentary hobby, I was never overweight as a child, not even a little bit.
As for gaming making people fat, all I can say is "What's he on?" Insofar as I remember when the original Pong came out, I wasn't a gamer as a child for the simple reason that there weren't any game consoles until I was in my teens already. However, I was an avid reader and spent at least as much time reading as avid gamers spend playing video games, and reading is definitely far more sedentary than gaming. I know a lot of gamers and participate occasionally myself. Gamers move around a lot more than readers do, and good games can definitely get your heart rate up. Using a Wii is practically exercise
So, I spent at least as much time at a sedentary activity when I was a kid as today's gamers do, but I wasn't fat. In fact, fat kids were just plain rare when I was in grade school. Now, they're pretty thick on the ground, so to speak. What was different back then? A couple things that I can think of: I (and most kids) ate way less fast good, junk food, and other prepared food than kids today, and even junk food wasn't as bad. Drinks and other junk foods that used sugar in those days no use high-fructose corn syrup, which is worse than sugar.
I know that a CEO has to promote his company, it's part of his job, but a statement like "Gaming is what makes kids fat" is just embarrassing.