You know what would sell even better? A pizza-box based on the eMac motherboard with no monitor included at all. Sure the aesthetics won't be perfect, but the shipping cost savings alone would easily let Apple slash the price.
Seems to violate their principle of selling complete systems that help you get your work done, not cause more work. -- p
With their huge installed base and over 90% market share, Micro$oft can introduce technology (e.g. palladium) which can effectively shut linux out of the consumer sector.
The best defense against this is gaining market share. -- p
i remember talking about millikan's famous oil drop experiments in freshman physics class. turns out he selectively edited his experimental results, because he had a vision of what the right answer was.
i'm not going to say with a straight face that what millikan did is the same as what this guy did. i'm just noting that these are two points on a behavioral continuum also known as "the slippery slope".
this guy had already discovered one element. he probably truly thought these other two elements were right there and if didn't hurry up and find them, somebody else would, and if he was right, what's the difference? he knew what the data should look like.
This is really amazing because our cs department sucks so much. Until very recently the cs unix servers would not forward X11 connections,/etc/shells was not readable, and ssh keys couldn't be used as a login method. It looks like ypcat passwd still gives me the password file (been meaning to go down there and tell them about that) and neither ypchsh nor chsh is installed so I still can't change my shell.
You know, computer science is different than unix system administration. Computer science is, fundamentally, the study of algorithms (which themselves are equivalence classes of physical processes). Your department may very well suck, but the fact that the unix boxes are poorly run does not necessarily make your case.
No consensus yet, but they sure seem to keep trying.
And they will continue to try, forever, until they get what they want or go bankrupt.
M$ makes $1b / month in revenue. They have the resources to keep fighting this fight forever. Our only defense is eternal diligence. Our only offense is to support open standards and companies committed to open standards every chance we get. There are alot of people here who make purchasing decisions for IT departments. When you vote with your dollars, don't forget what's happening here.
If there is a usage limit, spell it out. If you want more money for more usage, publish a price schedule. But quit targeting early adopters who are just using their connections in new and innovative ways.
Perhaps the contract is working as designed.
I hear that a small fraction of customers use most of the bandwidth. Turn that around, and it says a large fraction of customers are paying too much money. If billing went metered, competition might eventually drive down the price of broadband for most users to the point where the provider couldn't make any money.
Just speculation... like to hear from people who run ISPs to see if this theory makes any sense.
"The use of excessive bandwidth is something that Buckeye does not condone or will not stand. The clear distinction between this type of theft and the theft of cable services is that there is a finite amount of resource. The more the customer uses, the less there is to go around for other customers. These customers were impacting the performance of all our other customers," Mr. Shryock said.
The other difference is that they can actually detect theft of bandwidth.
although macs were much better for my less computer literate friends than pcs were in the early 90s, i always recommended pcs. people listened to me. i feel bad now, because i realize not everybody wants to rip their computer apart or reinstall their OS every week.
bottom line: you have to capture nerd mindshare. when non-computer literate people go to buy something, they ask their token nerd friend what the thing to get is, and they get it.
better game selection, cheaper prices, better footprint, etc. are all problems money can fix. however, i wonder how microsoft is going to overcome their bad reputation among the nerds who influence purchasing decisions among less saavy consumers.
Although Microsoft does have a shitload of money, I believe they made a fundamental mistake, and their high rate of success is only going to make them fall much harder when the time comes. That mistake was simply trying to accomplish too much. Regardless of their size and resources, they simply can't manufacture the rigorous quality that's becoming ever more important in our world. Their software is defective to the core, and it shows...
I believe Microsoft would have been much better off if they didn't produce any software at all! Instead, they would be a software publisher, a packaging and marketing company of sorts.
i'm sorry, but this is ridiculous, and i'm an avid linux fan.
we're talking about one of the most successful companies of all time. had they waited until their products were very reliable (something *not* demanded by the marketplace at the time) instead of building the empire, they wouldn't have $40b in the bank and $1b/mo in profits.
and as for being a software publisher, well, if i were microsoft, you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming away from a model that generates $1b/mo. reliability is a factor for them now that they want to invade upmarket into the server/enterprise arenas, but they now appreciate this at a deep level (bill gates' memo). with $1b/mo, they can eventually buy reliability. hey, they can hire 100k more developers whose sole job is to audit their codebase for security problems, or they can rewrite windows from scratch (again), and buy a small country to boot.
i love linux. my startup uses linux exclusively. i've put people through a little bit of hell getting them to use openoffice and mozilla, with the occasional incompatibilities that arise and the confusion of a novel interface, because i neither enjoy nor understand how to administer windows boxes. but i attribute most of the defects in windows to the lack of sophistication among consumers (much like i blame bad politicians on the electorate). for microsoft the company, i have only grudging respect, mixed with a little fear.
you can patent any natural product which you identify, isolate and purify.
any molecule that we can put together almost certainly exists (by accident) in the world already. take aspirin. it was (more or less) in tree bark already. ditto for digitalis.
basically, it's a cheap shot to say "that existed already"... because if we didn't know about it, hadn't isolated or purified it, or understood it's functional significance, it's basically a needle sitting in the haystack of the world.
the quid quo pro is we incentive significant contributions, and people do work they otherwise wouldn't do. in the case of amgen's patent on the epo gene, they figured out a molecule (of dna) that causes bacteria to produce a protein that *cures anemia*. sounds significant to me, even if it once you know the answer you can find it in your own cell.
i would like to explain the case "amgen vs. tkt" which is alluded to in the article.
basically, amgen has composition of matters patent on epo, both the sequence (which causes it's production in bacteria) and the protein (which is the stuff actually injected into the patient).
tkt caused cells to produce epo w/o using the epo sequence to coerce bacteria into producing it -- instead they coerced cells into producing it, without ever introducing the epo sequence into those cells. they then harvested the epo protein and (wanted to) sell it for serious $$$.
the court found that tkt did not violate amgen's sequence patent but did violate amgen's patent on the protein. hence, tkt did not have a product.
now, if tkt or anybody else came up with a compound which increases the endogenous production of epo, it's widely believed that neither the sequence patent or the protein patent would be infringed.
the difference is that such an "endogenous upregulator" would never require collecting and administering the protein (which has a composition of matter patent associated with it).
but this is no big deal. it's been known for some time. my company focuses on drugs that regulate gene expression. nonetheless, nobody has ever found such a magic epo upregulator, and with $2b in sales, you can bet people are trying.
> countermeasure: encryption + the bad press that randomly sueing upstanding citizens would bring.
...
> countermeasure: webs of trust & md5 hashes.
look at gnutella protocol sometime. every node is a router. it is easy to modify packets as your routing them, and mediadefender.com is almost certainly doing this. it's the ultimate man-in-the-middle.
if you want to attach a cryptographically secure signature to each of your packets which verifies the source, that makes it easier to litigate against you. since a sizeable fraction of the capacity of the network is contained in a relatively small number of high bandwidth ("university") nodes, these signatures could have a chilling effect on the entire network.
as for bad press, the evil pirates who are stealing music and trading child porn have always faired worse than the media conglomerates who control the nightly news.
i'm not saying these problems are insurmountable, but these questions do not have trivial answers, and should be taken very seriously.
it's so funny... the original transporter on star trek was introduced because they lacked the budget to handle shuttlecraft scenes. the famous roddenberry quote is "what if they just appeared there?"
my feeling about bioinformatics scene (yes, i'm in it, currently employed, and making hiring decisions) is it's not so rosy.
very large bioinformatics firms, e.g. doubletwist, have folded. other leaders in bioinformatics such as celera are getting out of the game and laying off informaticians. it all adds up to alot of extra resumes.
it should swing back, eventually, but characterizing it as "hot" right now is a disservice. at my company, most of our new hires will be in assay development, analytical and synthetic chemistry, and protein biochemistry. we are not atypical.
as for the qualifications... well... i look for people who know decision theory, hidden markov models, and monte carlo methods. these tools are also useful for "data mining" in other fields with series data, e.g., financial analysis or image analysis, so learning them is likely to broaden your horizons.
i have one on my monitor, and it's a bitch. does anybody know if the dlp projectors develop stuck pixels?
that'd be up there in annoyance with a hole in the screen.
To do this, they would need to gain access to the building (either during business hours, with a stolen swipe card (or a legit one if the work in the building)) - then access the roofs of either level 2 or 5,
Wow... roofs. hadn't heard of that one. is it some kind of advanced filesystem for buildings? i'd like to see a benchmark against xfs, jfs, and ext3.
--p
Lacovara asked Madnick if the fact that the academic couldn't name another operating system without a browser that couldn't be removed was important. Madnick said it was not, and said a remarkable feat had been performed by software engineers at Microsoft. "The fact that they have designed it this way is a benefit," he said.
hehe, sure, it's been beneficial in crushing competition. this is from the same guy who thought kde and gnome were operating systems, btw.
1. the main utility of contract law is to allow for predictable unambiguous consequences of agreements. when you make an agreement with somebody, you'd like to know _exactly_ what the implications are, especially if you are committing alot of money. this is the service that precedent of contract law provides, but obviously to take advantage precise terminology is required. you like to get unambiguous predictable results from the instructions you feed your computer, don't you? doesn't that require _highly_ structured and specialized "languages" to pull off?
2. there already is a reasonable man's standard in the law, and there is already a doctrine regarding contracts where one party is _far_ more legally sophisticated than the other.
i'm not trying to be confrontational here, i would just like to know what the point of theorizing about bubbling sub-universes which are unobservable (?) and form completely isolated space-time. surely there are some observable consequences of these things for people (scientists) to talk about them? anybody conversant in quantum GR care to elaborate?
default judgements are handed out like candy when the defendant is avoiding the proceedings. they often give the plaintiff everything they want, but they are extremely easy to overturn.
basically, the court is trying to get the defendant's attention. nothing more.
damn, i posted this before but i misspelled preferences, so
to be clear:
if you have a recent version of apt, and you put the following lines into/etc/apt/preferences it will get unstable packages when there is no testing version.
--- begin cut here ---
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50
--- end cut here ---
Slashdot Mirror
You know what would sell even better? A pizza-box based on the eMac motherboard with no monitor included at all. Sure the aesthetics won't be perfect, but the shipping cost savings alone would easily let Apple slash the price.
Seems to violate their principle of selling complete systems that help you get your work done, not cause more work.
-- p
We don't NEED to gain market share.
With their huge installed base and over 90% market share, Micro$oft can introduce technology (e.g. palladium) which can effectively shut linux out of the consumer sector.
The best defense against this is gaining market share.
-- p
since we are all twisted pedophile pirates, here's some links to mp3s.
-- p
p.z. made you look!
i remember talking about millikan's famous oil drop experiments in freshman physics class. turns out he selectively edited his experimental results, because he had a vision of what the right answer was.
i'm not going to say with a straight face that what millikan did is the same as what this guy did. i'm just noting that these are two points on a behavioral continuum also known as "the slippery slope".
this guy had already discovered one element. he probably truly thought these other two elements were right there and if didn't hurry up and find them, somebody else would, and if he was right, what's the difference? he knew what the data should look like.
the lesson: peer review exists for a reason.
-- p
The following additional situations make me think offsite, up-to-date backups are still a VERY good thing:
rsync.
'nuff said.
-- p
This is really amazing because our cs department sucks so much. Until very recently the cs unix servers would not forward X11 connections,
You know, computer science is different than unix system administration. Computer science is, fundamentally, the study of algorithms (which themselves are equivalence classes of physical processes). Your department may very well suck, but the fact that the unix boxes are poorly run does not necessarily make your case.
-- p
No consensus yet, but they sure seem to keep trying.
And they will continue to try, forever, until they get what they want or go bankrupt.
M$ makes $1b / month in revenue. They have the resources to keep fighting this fight forever. Our only defense is eternal diligence. Our only offense is to support open standards and companies committed to open standards every chance we get. There are alot of people here who make purchasing decisions for IT departments. When you vote with your dollars, don't forget what's happening here.
-- p
If there is a usage limit, spell it out. If you want more money for more usage, publish a price schedule. But quit targeting early adopters who are just using their connections in new and innovative ways.
... like to hear from people who run ISPs to see if this theory makes any sense.
Perhaps the contract is working as designed.
I hear that a small fraction of customers use most of the bandwidth. Turn that around, and it says a large fraction of customers are paying too much money. If billing went metered, competition might eventually drive down the price of broadband for most users to the point where the provider couldn't make any money.
Just speculation
-- p
3) Protocol 11 get through many firewalls because sysadmins only set up rules to block unwanted TCP, UDP, and ICMP packets.
Sad but true. The lesson here is, setup firewalls with default deny rules, and only accept the packets you want.
"The use of excessive bandwidth is something that Buckeye does not condone or will not stand. The clear distinction between this type of theft and the theft of cable services is that there is a finite amount of resource. The more the customer uses, the less there is to go around for other customers. These customers were impacting the performance of all our other customers," Mr. Shryock said.
The other difference is that they can actually detect theft of bandwidth.
although macs were much better for my less computer literate friends than pcs were in the early 90s, i always recommended pcs. people listened to me. i feel bad now, because i realize not everybody wants to rip their computer apart or reinstall their OS every week.
bottom line: you have to capture nerd mindshare. when non-computer literate people go to buy something, they ask their token nerd friend what the thing to get is, and they get it.
better game selection, cheaper prices, better footprint, etc. are all problems money can fix. however, i wonder how microsoft is going to overcome their bad reputation among the nerds who influence purchasing decisions among less saavy consumers.
Although Microsoft does have a shitload of money, I believe they made a fundamental mistake, and their high rate of success is only going to make them fall much harder when the time comes. That mistake was simply trying to accomplish too much. Regardless of their size and resources, they simply can't manufacture the rigorous quality that's becoming ever more important in our world. Their software is defective to the core, and it shows ...
I believe Microsoft would have been much better off if they didn't produce any software at all! Instead, they would be a software publisher, a packaging and marketing company of sorts.
i'm sorry, but this is ridiculous, and i'm an avid linux fan.
we're talking about one of the most successful companies of all time. had they waited until their products were very reliable (something *not* demanded by the marketplace at the time) instead of building the empire, they wouldn't have $40b in the bank and $1b/mo in profits.
and as for being a software publisher, well, if i were microsoft, you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming away from a model that generates $1b/mo. reliability is a factor for them now that they want to invade upmarket into the server/enterprise arenas, but they now appreciate this at a deep level (bill gates' memo). with $1b/mo, they can eventually buy reliability. hey, they can hire 100k more developers whose sole job is to audit their codebase for security problems, or they can rewrite windows from scratch (again), and buy a small country to boot.
i love linux. my startup uses linux exclusively. i've put people through a little bit of hell getting them to use openoffice and mozilla, with the occasional incompatibilities that arise and the confusion of a novel interface, because i neither enjoy nor understand how to administer windows boxes. but i attribute most of the defects in windows to the lack of sophistication among consumers (much like i blame bad politicians on the electorate). for microsoft the company, i have only grudging respect, mixed with a little fear.
you can patent any natural product which you identify, isolate and purify.
... because if we didn't know about it, hadn't isolated or purified it, or understood it's functional significance, it's basically a needle sitting in the haystack of the world.
any molecule that we can put together almost certainly exists (by accident) in the world already. take aspirin. it was (more or less) in tree bark already. ditto for digitalis.
basically, it's a cheap shot to say "that existed already"
the quid quo pro is we incentive significant contributions, and people do work they otherwise wouldn't do. in the case of amgen's patent on the epo gene, they figured out a molecule (of dna) that causes bacteria to produce a protein that *cures anemia*. sounds significant to me, even if it once you know the answer you can find it in your own cell.
i would like to explain the case "amgen vs. tkt" which is alluded to in the article.
basically, amgen has composition of matters patent on epo, both the sequence (which causes it's production in bacteria) and the protein (which is the stuff actually injected into the patient).
tkt caused cells to produce epo w/o using the epo sequence to coerce bacteria into producing it -- instead they coerced cells into producing it, without ever introducing the epo sequence into those cells. they then harvested the epo protein and (wanted to) sell it for serious $$$.
the court found that tkt did not violate amgen's sequence patent but did violate amgen's patent on the protein. hence, tkt did not have a product.
now, if tkt or anybody else came up with a compound which increases the endogenous production of epo, it's widely believed that neither the sequence patent or the protein patent would be infringed.
the difference is that such an "endogenous upregulator" would never require collecting and administering the protein (which has a composition of matter patent associated with it).
but this is no big deal. it's been known for some time. my company focuses on drugs that regulate gene expression. nonetheless, nobody has ever found such a magic epo upregulator, and with $2b in sales, you can bet people are trying.
> countermeasure: encryption + the bad press that randomly sueing upstanding citizens would bring.
...
> countermeasure: webs of trust & md5 hashes.
look at gnutella protocol sometime. every node is a router. it is easy to modify packets as your routing them, and mediadefender.com is almost certainly doing this. it's the ultimate man-in-the-middle.
if you want to attach a cryptographically secure signature to each of your packets which verifies the source, that makes it easier to litigate against you. since a sizeable fraction of the capacity of the network is contained in a relatively small number of high bandwidth ("university") nodes, these signatures could have a chilling effect on the entire network.
as for bad press, the evil pirates who are stealing music and trading child porn have always faired worse than the media conglomerates who control the nightly news.
i'm not saying these problems are insurmountable, but these questions do not have trivial answers, and should be taken very seriously.
-- p
it's so funny ... the original transporter on star trek was introduced because they lacked the budget to handle shuttlecraft scenes. the famous roddenberry quote is "what if they just appeared there?"
and here it is, inspiring cool science. neat.
-- p
my feeling about bioinformatics scene (yes, i'm in it, currently employed, and making hiring decisions) is it's not so rosy.
... well ... i look for people who know decision theory, hidden markov models, and monte carlo methods. these tools are also useful for "data mining" in other fields with series data, e.g., financial analysis or image analysis, so learning them is likely to broaden your horizons.
very large bioinformatics firms, e.g. doubletwist, have folded. other leaders in bioinformatics such as celera are getting out of the game and laying off informaticians. it all adds up to alot of extra resumes.
it should swing back, eventually, but characterizing it as "hot" right now is a disservice. at my company, most of our new hires will be in assay development, analytical and synthetic chemistry, and protein biochemistry. we are not atypical.
as for the qualifications
-- p
i have one on my monitor, and it's a bitch. does anybody know if the dlp projectors develop stuck pixels? that'd be up there in annoyance with a hole in the screen.
To do this, they would need to gain access to the building (either during business hours, with a stolen swipe card (or a legit one if the work in the building)) - then access the roofs of either level 2 or 5,
... roofs. hadn't heard of that one. is it some kind of advanced filesystem for buildings? i'd like to see a benchmark against xfs, jfs, and ext3.
Wow
--p
Lacovara asked Madnick if the fact that the academic couldn't name another operating system without a browser that couldn't be removed was important. Madnick said it was not, and said a remarkable feat had been performed by software engineers at Microsoft. "The fact that they have designed it this way is a benefit," he said.
hehe, sure, it's been beneficial in crushing competition. this is from the same guy who thought kde and gnome were operating systems, btw.
two comments (IANAL).
1. the main utility of contract law is to allow for predictable unambiguous consequences of agreements. when you make an agreement with somebody, you'd like to know _exactly_ what the implications are, especially if you are committing alot of money. this is the service that precedent of contract law provides, but obviously to take advantage precise terminology is required. you like to get unambiguous predictable results from the instructions you feed your computer, don't you? doesn't that require _highly_ structured and specialized "languages" to pull off?
2. there already is a reasonable man's standard in the law, and there is already a doctrine regarding contracts where one party is _far_ more legally sophisticated than the other.
'nuff said.
-- p
i'm not trying to be confrontational here, i would just like to know what the point of theorizing about bubbling sub-universes which are unobservable (?) and form completely isolated space-time. surely there are some observable consequences of these things for people (scientists) to talk about them? anybody conversant in quantum GR care to elaborate?
-- p
to pull it off: pcs w/o operating systems installed.
default judgements are handed out like candy when the defendant is avoiding the proceedings. they often give the plaintiff everything they want, but they are extremely easy to overturn.
basically, the court is trying to get the defendant's attention. nothing more.
-- p
damn, i posted this before but i misspelled preferences, so to be clear: /etc/apt/preferences it will get unstable packages when there is no testing version.
if you have a recent version of apt, and you put the following lines into
--- begin cut here ---
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50
--- end cut here ---
enjoy,
-- p