Open Standards are a great thing, but part of being open by necessity means being created by committee, and generally a committee formed up of the people who are trying to generate their own proprietary solutions.
HTML standards are, in general, at least 2 years behind where the actual implementation is. People write websites in flash because flash is a relatively good solution to delivering cross platform Rich Internet Applications. HTML 5 looks like it will provide at least some help in generating these things using open standards and Microsoft's new attention to the HTML standards will help as well, but realistically by the time HTML 5 has any kind of real penetration the web will be moving onto the next big thing which HTML 5 won't be able to provide.
For better or worse, someone will provide the technology to implement what business wants to do with the web because that's the way the market works. The ideas which provide that technology will pretty much guaranteed never be from the W3C or any other open standards body, so the cutting edge of technology will pretty much always be using a standard which is unique to the software implementing it and standards will gradually come in sometimes years later.
Until someone can come up with a way to make committees efficient and people with diverging commercial interests work for the general good, this is probably just going to be the nature of life.
All of the above. The quality is overall lower, that lower quality requires more bandwidth, and since it's not hardware accelerated it's also more resource intensive.
The only thing Theora has going for it is that it's theoretically legal to use it without licensing anything. As far as I understand it there are a number of companies who claim this isn't actually the case, and the cases have yet to be settled, so it's only theoretical so far.
There are a number of things which will give you a leg up. Education, experience, and networking(the people kind not the cable kind) will all give you a leg up. Doing volunteer work(supporting your local non profit, doing open source coding, etc), getting a university education(and more importantly getting one of those student only university jobs), joining the right kind of local organizations all will help you.
However, the best way to progress is to work for someone who will give you a chance to do more and to prove to them that you're worth that chance. Small companies tend to be the best for this sort of thing. Generally they pay poorly and work you too hard, but because most of the time they're understaffed, you get to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of things which, if you're clever, can give you one hell of a resume.
The days of making 80 grand right out of the gate are long gone in most IT sectors, and the few that are left are flavor of the month type things which if you're not careful will kill your career dead in a few years when they go out of fashion or there isn't a shortage any more. IT jobs are just like every other job, you've got to work hard, and get lucky.
It does happen, but generally speaking not in the way postulated by most free market theorists.
The premise for reaching the best price is that if the existing companies don't reduce their prices, there will always be someone who will. This is demonstrably false, there are plenty of markets where the cost of entry is so high that the cost of production for any new entrant is so high that they cannot possibly compete on price with the existing players, not even counting cases like Microsoft where the structure of the market itself guarantees that competition cannot effectively compete.
I'm not saying that socialism is a particularly good idea, or that the free market doesn't work.
What I am saying is that the free market in and of itself does not produce the situation that a lot of people seem to think that it does. Simply leaving companies alone does not mean that over the long haul consumers will be better off. The government has a place in managing the economy and ensuring a certain amount of fairness as well as freedom is present within the market.
The problem with the normal interpretation of the free market(ie the laissez-faire model), is mostly that it relies on a false assumption.
The false assumption it relies upon is that the free market will result in the lowest sustainable price being achieved.
This is false because if you have 50% of the market share, then unless you think you can grab most of the other 50% by lowering your prices(at which point you have no competition and the new monopoly can charge whatever they like) what happens when you lower prices is that you end up with +/- 10% of what you already had with lower profit margins, which is really rather stupid.
Now the theory for the free market is that if two established players with 50% market share don't want to lower their prices, that a third party will enter the market and since an increase in market share at any profit margin will be an increase in overall revenue. This only works however if the cost of entry is as close to zero as possible, which in the modern era, it almost never is.
The only way to have zero cost of entry to any market would be for a third party to own all the infrastructure necessary to enter that market and to provide it to anyone who wanted to enter that market at the same cost. The only viable option for that third party would realistically be some form of public trust, that is to say the government. So ironically, the only way that the free market results in the lowest viable price is through a form of socialism.
It's always been that way. US cable companies would get really narky at you if you downloaded tv shows on their services.
Generally speaking ISPs only care as much about piracy as they're forced to because they make money by selling you internet access(it's a little different in the US because the US doesn't have quotas so they get narky if you use too much bandwidth, but not much). However if your ISP produces or distributes the content you're pirating they're all of a sudden really concerned. Virgin distributes music, so they care about music piracy, no big shock.
The world is always like that, Open Source guys pirate close source code but spit the dummy if the opposite happens. Move guys pirate software, software guys pirate movies. I remember flying with a guy who wrote scripts for movies and he was all up in arms against Movie piracy while writing his script on a pirated copy of Office.
You can bet that the RIAA guy pirates software and the BSA guy pirates movies because that's just the way the world works.
The moral of the story is never choose an ISP who is also a content provider.
So far that's only a theoretical problem, and so long as Theora exists it will probably remain one.
People, for the most part, don't mind paying a reasonable license fee for a product which does what they want. If/when license fees start to apply to internet broadcasters, some of them will switch to Theora, the higher the license fee charged, the more people who will do this. If the license fees become too high a critical mass of people will switch over and H.264 will become worthless.
The largest success of open source has been to provide an alternative to the dominant market players. It doesn't have to be an alternative that anyone uses for it to be successful, it just has to be enough of an alternative that if the dominant players screw over their consumers too hard that they could theoretically switch.
Ogg, PNG, Theora, all have served this purpose well, even if they've never really had any large scale adoption.
So from that perspective Theora is and will continue to be a huge win, even if no one ever plays a Theora video.
but that doesn't mean it can't, particularly if google are stupid.
I can think of a number of top tier companies, 3dfx for example, who were the absolute unquestioned masters of their market but who got wiped out because they didn't take their competition seriously and let their product stagnate.
Google almost certainly isn't running around in a panic over Bing, to wipe them out now would take a product which is measurably better in some important way(speed, ease of use, quality of results, etc) for anyone to even come close to toppling them. At the same time they'd be idiots to ignore new competition, inspiring the dominant market players to expend resources improving their products is one of the most common benefits of increased competition.
Google are just being sensible. Bing may be nothing in fact it almost certainly will be, but it may be something. Even if it only grabs 1% market share, if it grabs that share from google they lose money.
Only stupid companies blindly assume that their competition will fail and their dominance cannot be challenged, and Google are anything but a stupid company.
Nope, just reality. Windows has a monopoly because all the software runs on Windows, and all the software runs on Windows because Windows has a monopoly.
For better or worse, there is no court order that can change this. No judge can tell every software developer they have to produce software for every OS, and if they did it'd affect Open Source as much as it does closed.
That's not to say that Linux can't win. That's not to say that Microsoft hasn't done some things which were wrong. There's just no magical court order that a judge can give which can actually change anything. The damage is done.
As to the Netscape thing, I sincerely believe that. IMHO free browsers have been a massive boon to consumers and to the net as a whole. They haven't been particularly great for companies like Netscape which based their business model around selling one(though Opera proves that you can still make money making a browser, at least for the time being). I'm glad that browsers are free, it's provided infinite benefit to me and to millions of others. It has sucked for Netscape employees and stockholders, as well as for employees and stockholders of AOL, they lost money.
On the other hand without it the netscape code base would never have been open sourced and we wouldn't have Mozilla. You and I wouldn't be able to go and grab 5 different browsers for testing, development, or the pure unadulterated fun of it.
Browsers being free has been a wonderful thing. Netscape lost the browser war on their own. Microsoft sat on IE for ten years and stifled the web(something I curse every working day of my life), but that's being fixed, both because there are alternatives and because Microsoft is being forced to compete again.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, and I'm not a fan of Open Source, both groups have brilliant people in them, both groups have assholes in them. I've not used IE as a primary browser in more than a decade, I've used Windows and Linux for the things they're good at for even longer.
None of this changes the fact that this court case was always pointless, and that as time went along it's been getting more so. No decision has ever come out of it, because there is no decision which can make any difference. Neither the US nor Europe is going to order Microsoft out of existence, or cripple them so they go bankrupt, not least of all because they don't have that legal power. No fine that will ever be levied or paid will change what happened 20 years ago.
I don't really think that google cares about Chrome's market penetration in and of itself.
My theory is that google cares about getting fast, reliable, standards compliant javascript rendering a bigger market share. That's why I think they released chrome under a BSD license instead of as GPL(or some other form of copyleft license). If Microsoft and Mozilla steal Chrome's javascript engine, Google wins, if Chrome gains substantial market share, Google wins. Google wins because they're getting very close to needing fast javascript to make their ajaxy web apps work properly and however that happens they win.
And none of the browser makers wanted to be included either. This whole case has always been a fairly petty complaint from Netscape because they were making money out of a product Microsoft turned into a free commodity. Not so great for Netscape, but pretty damned great for consumers.
It's always been the underlying flaw with the monopoly case against Microsoft, yes Microsoft has the lion's share of the market. Yes it's very difficult for alternatives to compete. Yes Microsoft bought out or wiped out a few competitors along the way. What do you do about it? Consumers have pretty much universally failed to embrace linux, and the primary reason it's difficult to compete with Windows is because no matter how nice your OS is no one's software will run on it.
Whatever Microsoft did to get here, they're where they are now and no amount of these court cases is going to change that.
The only reason a bank would change this model is if they thought they could gain an advantage out of it, or their one of their competitors did it first.
Banks don't compete nearly as hard as you think they do for customers. Yes they're willing to spend quite a bit of money to get people in the door, but that's because in today's modern age where everything you do is tied to your bank account, changing banks is a lot of work and a customer will probably stay with them until life circumstances force them to change. That doesn't mean they work particularly hard to maintain customers, the hassle of leaving does most of that for them already.
Free market ideology claims that the result of the free market is that prices will be driven to their lowest sustainable level. This however, isn't remotely true unless the barriers to entry are close to zero, which is almost never the case. Most companies, even without collusion are well aware that the end result of a price war is that they're pretty much exactly where they were before only with tighter margins. Only a company who is large enough to believe they can wipe their competitors out with a price war(Microsoft) or small enough that they have nothing to lose by shaking up the status quo has any interest in starting a price war. There are very few small banks.
It is true that every time a law is passed people lose freedom. It is also true that a large number of recent digital laws have been badly written(under-engineered not over-engineered) and that the DMCA and the Patriot act are good examples of these(though you could argue that the people who framed those laws framed them for exactly the purpose to which they are being put and that they aren't in fact being abused from that perspective). That doesn't mean that certain activities shouldn't be illegal.
Using a legitimate process to maliciously bankrupt someone isn't necessarily fraud, but it is certainly behavior which needs to be discouraged, and expecting the systems to be perfect so it can't happen isn't a valid solution.
Your suggestion that banks should merely stop this from being possible is a bit like saying that every house should be impossible to break into by design and that therefor you shouldn't need a law against murdering someone in their bed. Certainly you need to prove the malicious intent, just as you need to prove that the murderer committed murder, but that doesn't mean you don't need a law.
In my personal experience, if you're always soft, then you'll get taken advantage of, and if you're always a bastard you get fired.
What you need to do is set out the policies, and enforce them, but be helpful when people do the right thing. Carrot and the stick type thing. Being a bastard isn't swearing or anything like that it's saying "I can't fix your problem until you log a job appropriately, or you're not the top of the list right now I'll get to you. Despite what most IT people think, the policies and procedures are there to protect you from this kind of shit.
If it's really bad talk to your manager, talk about how what's going on is affecting your productivity(this sort of thing always does) and how that is costing them money. Show the policies being violated or get some written.
If you're fair to people you get what you need, but if people are causing problems and violating the rules it can't go.
It should be illegal because someone with a great deal of money could use the technique to basically bankrupt anyone they so choose. If you sent enough money in small enough increments you could wipe out their entire savings and possibly their balance down to a significantly negative number depending on the bank.
Yes, banks are capable of stopping it, but since all those excess fees go to them, why should they? There's a thousand things which could be done to make micro-payments work, but the banks aren't particularly interested in them since they profit quite a bit out of the current system.
The digital age has created a large number of situations which previous laws were not designed to cover, and with the way most legal systems work(based on the letter of the law not the intent), this basically leaves giant loopholes violating the intent of the law.
Sometimes these loopholes benefit consumers, sometimes they don't. It's quite common when the shape of the world changes dramatically in a very short period of time. There's really no difference between this sort of thing and stuff like carnivore. The law probably doesn't protect against this, and it didn't protect against carnivore, in both cases the law need(s)(ed) to be changed to protect against something which fundamentally violates the intent of the law, but not its letter.
Over-engineering is necessary for laws because that's how laws work, if they don't explicitly make something legal, or explicitly make it illegal then often times they don't work, or at least not in the way they were intended. There's always judicial review, but while the interpretation of the law is sometimes necessary, that's no excuse for sloppy law.
From what I recall of this story, the stuff about asking for the money back certainly at least bordered on fraudulent, but I'm not entirely convinced that the micropayments in and of themselves were fraudulent, or that they even could be. Perhaps on a sufficiently large scale they could be called harassment.
The payments were, at least in theory, legitimate payments, an individual sent money to repay a legal debt. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no law requiring a minimum for an electronic payment, and the problem with these payments relates to banks(and is actually a very major obstacle to the various media industries in question as effective micro-billing will be potentially profitable for them.
Should sending someone money in small enough chunks that they lose money instead of gaining it be illegal. Almost certainly. Is it actually against any existing law, I'm not entirely sure. Probably one of he many digital loopholes that will eventually get filled by the law. There have been many of them, and the somewhat reactionary ways in which they were filled have been half of what caused this battle in the first place.
Mandarin is/was the court language of China, it was created in a rather clever way.
The country, being very large had a number of different dialects. Mandarin was developed so that while the spoken word might be different in different areas of the country the Mandarin text was identical regardless of where you were. It was a language of scholars and regular people never really learned it(they didn't need to). The spoken form wasn't used much by anyone who wasn't a courtier(though neither was the written form).
For example, Peking and Beijing are the same place, Peking is what they call(ed) it in the south, and Beijing is what they call it in the north, the written mandarin for both words is the same.
To a certain extent nearly all written languages were initially created because so very few people actually wrote in the early days that there wasn't really any sort of natural evolution for a lot of written languages. For a more specific example, during the early years of the soviet union when the soviets were encouraging the development of their ethnic minorities(as opposed to kicking them off their land and putting them in work camps as they did a few years later. The Soviet government actually sent linguists out to some of the more nomadic of these groups to develop a written form of their language, which prior to this effort had never existed. That's not even counting resurrected languages which likely bear no significant resemblance to their previous forms, but which are spoken by real live people, or made up languages like Klingon that regular folks.
Languages are both created and naturally evolve, and written languages and spoken languages do not always begin at the same time, are not always used by the same people, and are sometimes rather arbitrary.
While technically most servers are somewhat parallel in nature, it isn't really the same sort of thing that these sorts of languages are designed to achieve.
Servers, for the most part, are parallel because they have to be able to handle a lot of requests simultaneously, so they spin off a new thread or process(depending on the architecture) for each request to the server, do some relatively simple concurrency checking and then run each request, for the most part, in serial. They're parallel because the task being performed is parallel, a web server that could only return the page to one person at a time wouldn't work, not to make them faster or more efficient, or to take advantage of multiple processors. This kind of parallel architecture is relatively simple, because the architecture is defined by the requirements of the project and you just have to ensure that it works.
Taking something like a video encoder, PC game, compiler, etc and making it run in parallel so that it's faster and can take advantage of modern hardware is a totally different kettle of fish. You have to redesign your core idea so that it works in parallel, you have to turn one discrete task into two or more which can be run at the same time. It's a whole different challenge and one which very few programmers(myself included) seem to be prepared to meet.
This is true, but when you're looking at having to generate > 1 attack per second, social engineering isn't going to work. You're better off calling up and saying you've forgotten your password and can they reset it for you.
We can collectively stop answering these things with "don't" when people stop asking questions where it is the most appropriate response.
The answer to this question is definitely "don't".
There are ways to do it, but pretty much all of them involve far more money and/or time than just buying a reasonable PC for his fiancee. Hardware isn't all that expensive and solving a problem like this isn't easy, cheap, or particularly effective.
Slashdot gets a lot of these sorts of questions because for things where the answer is "don't" you generally don't find a lot of useful information from a google search and so people ask here instead. We tell them, don't, which is the best advice they can get.
It's not clear yet what Oracle plans for MySQL, whether they plan to use it to gain market share with companies where an Oracle solution is overkill, whether they're going to use it to create a cheap database appliance, or whether they plan to just scrap it.
Whatever their plans, having every loony in the bin fork the product and basically shatter the brand into a million pieces is probably the best thing they could hope for. Excessive forking, feature divergence and general uncertainty will kill MySQL for professional purposes which is all Oracle really cares about. If they want it dead it'll already be dead and if they want to use it, the "right" fork will be Oracle's.
There, you've just answered the question of the post. He never watched it, I never watched it. For better or worse, lots of people never watched it, the concept failed to grab people's attention. A lot of shows fail that way.
There are plenty of shows that die due to networks not giving them a chance, time slot changes, etc, but sometimes shows just fail because no one tunes in.
I don't blame Nader because the Republicans were in for 8 years, I blame Nader because George Bush was in for 8 years.
Because of that the whole world got stuck in a war that we can't win, and which wasn't any of our business. Because of that science took a back seat to fundamentalist ideology and the crazies too even more of the US. Because of that countries that could be helping make things better economically don't want anything to do with us. Because of that the US has lost almost all of its soft influence with the rest of the world and it will take someone probably greater than Obama promises he will be, which is probably greater than he can be, years to undo that damage.
I don't give a rats that the republicans won, I liked John McCain in 2000(though not in 2008).
I blame Nader because, though he claims to be an environmentalist, he scuppered a candidate who whatever else he might have or would have done, was probably the greatest hope for real positive change for the planet we had. He didn't do that because he had a chance for winning, he did that to because he wanted more money for his political party.
It would have been wonderful to have been able to freely vote for Nader in 2000. I probably would have if I had been free to do so, but eight years of George Bush is a price the US and the world will be paying for decades to come, whether the republicans or democrats(both of whom are still fighting battles that don't meet the needs of the modern world) ever get elected again.
Well, Washington thought we should only have one because having two would be divisive, though he didn't really specify which party ought to be the only one, John Adams thought it ought to be illegal to belong to any party other than his, and most of the rest of them seem to have believed that the people shouldn't have had much choice in who was president in the first place.
That said, it's still Nader's fault, because despite the faults of the US voting system, Nader knew those faults, and knew exactly what he was doing. He thought that getting more funding for his party was worth 4 years of George Bush and as I recall he didn't even get enough votes to get the extra funding anyway so he shafted us, and everything he stood for for 8 years to prove a point.
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It is unfortunately a natural part of live.
Open Standards are a great thing, but part of being open by necessity means being created by committee, and generally a committee formed up of the people who are trying to generate their own proprietary solutions.
HTML standards are, in general, at least 2 years behind where the actual implementation is. People write websites in flash because flash is a relatively good solution to delivering cross platform Rich Internet Applications. HTML 5 looks like it will provide at least some help in generating these things using open standards and Microsoft's new attention to the HTML standards will help as well, but realistically by the time HTML 5 has any kind of real penetration the web will be moving onto the next big thing which HTML 5 won't be able to provide.
For better or worse, someone will provide the technology to implement what business wants to do with the web because that's the way the market works. The ideas which provide that technology will pretty much guaranteed never be from the W3C or any other open standards body, so the cutting edge of technology will pretty much always be using a standard which is unique to the software implementing it and standards will gradually come in sometimes years later.
Until someone can come up with a way to make committees efficient and people with diverging commercial interests work for the general good, this is probably just going to be the nature of life.
All of the above. The quality is overall lower, that lower quality requires more bandwidth, and since it's not hardware accelerated it's also more resource intensive.
The only thing Theora has going for it is that it's theoretically legal to use it without licensing anything. As far as I understand it there are a number of companies who claim this isn't actually the case, and the cases have yet to be settled, so it's only theoretical so far.
There are a number of things which will give you a leg up. Education, experience, and networking(the people kind not the cable kind) will all give you a leg up. Doing volunteer work(supporting your local non profit, doing open source coding, etc), getting a university education(and more importantly getting one of those student only university jobs), joining the right kind of local organizations all will help you.
However, the best way to progress is to work for someone who will give you a chance to do more and to prove to them that you're worth that chance. Small companies tend to be the best for this sort of thing. Generally they pay poorly and work you too hard, but because most of the time they're understaffed, you get to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of things which, if you're clever, can give you one hell of a resume.
The days of making 80 grand right out of the gate are long gone in most IT sectors, and the few that are left are flavor of the month type things which if you're not careful will kill your career dead in a few years when they go out of fashion or there isn't a shortage any more. IT jobs are just like every other job, you've got to work hard, and get lucky.
It does happen, but generally speaking not in the way postulated by most free market theorists.
The premise for reaching the best price is that if the existing companies don't reduce their prices, there will always be someone who will. This is demonstrably false, there are plenty of markets where the cost of entry is so high that the cost of production for any new entrant is so high that they cannot possibly compete on price with the existing players, not even counting cases like Microsoft where the structure of the market itself guarantees that competition cannot effectively compete.
I'm not saying that socialism is a particularly good idea, or that the free market doesn't work.
What I am saying is that the free market in and of itself does not produce the situation that a lot of people seem to think that it does. Simply leaving companies alone does not mean that over the long haul consumers will be better off. The government has a place in managing the economy and ensuring a certain amount of fairness as well as freedom is present within the market.
The problem with the normal interpretation of the free market(ie the laissez-faire model), is mostly that it relies on a false assumption.
The false assumption it relies upon is that the free market will result in the lowest sustainable price being achieved.
This is false because if you have 50% of the market share, then unless you think you can grab most of the other 50% by lowering your prices(at which point you have no competition and the new monopoly can charge whatever they like) what happens when you lower prices is that you end up with +/- 10% of what you already had with lower profit margins, which is really rather stupid.
Now the theory for the free market is that if two established players with 50% market share don't want to lower their prices, that a third party will enter the market and since an increase in market share at any profit margin will be an increase in overall revenue. This only works however if the cost of entry is as close to zero as possible, which in the modern era, it almost never is.
The only way to have zero cost of entry to any market would be for a third party to own all the infrastructure necessary to enter that market and to provide it to anyone who wanted to enter that market at the same cost. The only viable option for that third party would realistically be some form of public trust, that is to say the government. So ironically, the only way that the free market results in the lowest viable price is through a form of socialism.
It's always been that way. US cable companies would get really narky at you if you downloaded tv shows on their services.
Generally speaking ISPs only care as much about piracy as they're forced to because they make money by selling you internet access(it's a little different in the US because the US doesn't have quotas so they get narky if you use too much bandwidth, but not much). However if your ISP produces or distributes the content you're pirating they're all of a sudden really concerned. Virgin distributes music, so they care about music piracy, no big shock.
The world is always like that, Open Source guys pirate close source code but spit the dummy if the opposite happens. Move guys pirate software, software guys pirate movies. I remember flying with a guy who wrote scripts for movies and he was all up in arms against Movie piracy while writing his script on a pirated copy of Office.
You can bet that the RIAA guy pirates software and the BSA guy pirates movies because that's just the way the world works.
The moral of the story is never choose an ISP who is also a content provider.
So far that's only a theoretical problem, and so long as Theora exists it will probably remain one.
People, for the most part, don't mind paying a reasonable license fee for a product which does what they want. If/when license fees start to apply to internet broadcasters, some of them will switch to Theora, the higher the license fee charged, the more people who will do this. If the license fees become too high a critical mass of people will switch over and H.264 will become worthless.
The largest success of open source has been to provide an alternative to the dominant market players. It doesn't have to be an alternative that anyone uses for it to be successful, it just has to be enough of an alternative that if the dominant players screw over their consumers too hard that they could theoretically switch.
Ogg, PNG, Theora, all have served this purpose well, even if they've never really had any large scale adoption.
So from that perspective Theora is and will continue to be a huge win, even if no one ever plays a Theora video.
Good luck finding a company that is not and has never been unethical.
I can think of a number of top tier companies, 3dfx for example, who were the absolute unquestioned masters of their market but who got wiped out because they didn't take their competition seriously and let their product stagnate.
Google almost certainly isn't running around in a panic over Bing, to wipe them out now would take a product which is measurably better in some important way(speed, ease of use, quality of results, etc) for anyone to even come close to toppling them. At the same time they'd be idiots to ignore new competition, inspiring the dominant market players to expend resources improving their products is one of the most common benefits of increased competition.
Google are just being sensible. Bing may be nothing in fact it almost certainly will be, but it may be something. Even if it only grabs 1% market share, if it grabs that share from google they lose money.
Only stupid companies blindly assume that their competition will fail and their dominance cannot be challenged, and Google are anything but a stupid company.
Nope, just reality. Windows has a monopoly because all the software runs on Windows, and all the software runs on Windows because Windows has a monopoly.
For better or worse, there is no court order that can change this. No judge can tell every software developer they have to produce software for every OS, and if they did it'd affect Open Source as much as it does closed.
That's not to say that Linux can't win. That's not to say that Microsoft hasn't done some things which were wrong. There's just no magical court order that a judge can give which can actually change anything. The damage is done.
As to the Netscape thing, I sincerely believe that. IMHO free browsers have been a massive boon to consumers and to the net as a whole. They haven't been particularly great for companies like Netscape which based their business model around selling one(though Opera proves that you can still make money making a browser, at least for the time being). I'm glad that browsers are free, it's provided infinite benefit to me and to millions of others. It has sucked for Netscape employees and stockholders, as well as for employees and stockholders of AOL, they lost money.
On the other hand without it the netscape code base would never have been open sourced and we wouldn't have Mozilla. You and I wouldn't be able to go and grab 5 different browsers for testing, development, or the pure unadulterated fun of it.
Browsers being free has been a wonderful thing. Netscape lost the browser war on their own. Microsoft sat on IE for ten years and stifled the web(something I curse every working day of my life), but that's being fixed, both because there are alternatives and because Microsoft is being forced to compete again.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, and I'm not a fan of Open Source, both groups have brilliant people in them, both groups have assholes in them. I've not used IE as a primary browser in more than a decade, I've used Windows and Linux for the things they're good at for even longer.
None of this changes the fact that this court case was always pointless, and that as time went along it's been getting more so. No decision has ever come out of it, because there is no decision which can make any difference. Neither the US nor Europe is going to order Microsoft out of existence, or cripple them so they go bankrupt, not least of all because they don't have that legal power. No fine that will ever be levied or paid will change what happened 20 years ago.
I don't really think that google cares about Chrome's market penetration in and of itself.
My theory is that google cares about getting fast, reliable, standards compliant javascript rendering a bigger market share. That's why I think they released chrome under a BSD license instead of as GPL(or some other form of copyleft license). If Microsoft and Mozilla steal Chrome's javascript engine, Google wins, if Chrome gains substantial market share, Google wins. Google wins because they're getting very close to needing fast javascript to make their ajaxy web apps work properly and however that happens they win.
And none of the browser makers wanted to be included either. This whole case has always been a fairly petty complaint from Netscape because they were making money out of a product Microsoft turned into a free commodity. Not so great for Netscape, but pretty damned great for consumers.
It's always been the underlying flaw with the monopoly case against Microsoft, yes Microsoft has the lion's share of the market. Yes it's very difficult for alternatives to compete. Yes Microsoft bought out or wiped out a few competitors along the way. What do you do about it? Consumers have pretty much universally failed to embrace linux, and the primary reason it's difficult to compete with Windows is because no matter how nice your OS is no one's software will run on it.
Whatever Microsoft did to get here, they're where they are now and no amount of these court cases is going to change that.
The only reason a bank would change this model is if they thought they could gain an advantage out of it, or their one of their competitors did it first.
Banks don't compete nearly as hard as you think they do for customers. Yes they're willing to spend quite a bit of money to get people in the door, but that's because in today's modern age where everything you do is tied to your bank account, changing banks is a lot of work and a customer will probably stay with them until life circumstances force them to change. That doesn't mean they work particularly hard to maintain customers, the hassle of leaving does most of that for them already.
Free market ideology claims that the result of the free market is that prices will be driven to their lowest sustainable level. This however, isn't remotely true unless the barriers to entry are close to zero, which is almost never the case. Most companies, even without collusion are well aware that the end result of a price war is that they're pretty much exactly where they were before only with tighter margins. Only a company who is large enough to believe they can wipe their competitors out with a price war(Microsoft) or small enough that they have nothing to lose by shaking up the status quo has any interest in starting a price war. There are very few small banks.
It is true that every time a law is passed people lose freedom. It is also true that a large number of recent digital laws have been badly written(under-engineered not over-engineered) and that the DMCA and the Patriot act are good examples of these(though you could argue that the people who framed those laws framed them for exactly the purpose to which they are being put and that they aren't in fact being abused from that perspective). That doesn't mean that certain activities shouldn't be illegal.
Using a legitimate process to maliciously bankrupt someone isn't necessarily fraud, but it is certainly behavior which needs to be discouraged, and expecting the systems to be perfect so it can't happen isn't a valid solution.
Your suggestion that banks should merely stop this from being possible is a bit like saying that every house should be impossible to break into by design and that therefor you shouldn't need a law against murdering someone in their bed. Certainly you need to prove the malicious intent, just as you need to prove that the murderer committed murder, but that doesn't mean you don't need a law.
In my personal experience, if you're always soft, then you'll get taken advantage of, and if you're always a bastard you get fired.
What you need to do is set out the policies, and enforce them, but be helpful when people do the right thing. Carrot and the stick type thing. Being a bastard isn't swearing or anything like that it's saying "I can't fix your problem until you log a job appropriately, or you're not the top of the list right now I'll get to you. Despite what most IT people think, the policies and procedures are there to protect you from this kind of shit.
If it's really bad talk to your manager, talk about how what's going on is affecting your productivity(this sort of thing always does) and how that is costing them money. Show the policies being violated or get some written.
If you're fair to people you get what you need, but if people are causing problems and violating the rules it can't go.
It should be illegal because someone with a great deal of money could use the technique to basically bankrupt anyone they so choose. If you sent enough money in small enough increments you could wipe out their entire savings and possibly their balance down to a significantly negative number depending on the bank.
Yes, banks are capable of stopping it, but since all those excess fees go to them, why should they? There's a thousand things which could be done to make micro-payments work, but the banks aren't particularly interested in them since they profit quite a bit out of the current system.
The digital age has created a large number of situations which previous laws were not designed to cover, and with the way most legal systems work(based on the letter of the law not the intent), this basically leaves giant loopholes violating the intent of the law.
Sometimes these loopholes benefit consumers, sometimes they don't. It's quite common when the shape of the world changes dramatically in a very short period of time. There's really no difference between this sort of thing and stuff like carnivore. The law probably doesn't protect against this, and it didn't protect against carnivore, in both cases the law need(s)(ed) to be changed to protect against something which fundamentally violates the intent of the law, but not its letter.
Over-engineering is necessary for laws because that's how laws work, if they don't explicitly make something legal, or explicitly make it illegal then often times they don't work, or at least not in the way they were intended. There's always judicial review, but while the interpretation of the law is sometimes necessary, that's no excuse for sloppy law.
From what I recall of this story, the stuff about asking for the money back certainly at least bordered on fraudulent, but I'm not entirely convinced that the micropayments in and of themselves were fraudulent, or that they even could be. Perhaps on a sufficiently large scale they could be called harassment.
The payments were, at least in theory, legitimate payments, an individual sent money to repay a legal debt. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no law requiring a minimum for an electronic payment, and the problem with these payments relates to banks(and is actually a very major obstacle to the various media industries in question as effective micro-billing will be potentially profitable for them.
Should sending someone money in small enough chunks that they lose money instead of gaining it be illegal. Almost certainly. Is it actually against any existing law, I'm not entirely sure. Probably one of he many digital loopholes that will eventually get filled by the law. There have been many of them, and the somewhat reactionary ways in which they were filled have been half of what caused this battle in the first place.
Mandarin is/was the court language of China, it was created in a rather clever way.
The country, being very large had a number of different dialects. Mandarin was developed so that while the spoken word might be different in different areas of the country the Mandarin text was identical regardless of where you were. It was a language of scholars and regular people never really learned it(they didn't need to). The spoken form wasn't used much by anyone who wasn't a courtier(though neither was the written form).
For example, Peking and Beijing are the same place, Peking is what they call(ed) it in the south, and Beijing is what they call it in the north, the written mandarin for both words is the same.
To a certain extent nearly all written languages were initially created because so very few people actually wrote in the early days that there wasn't really any sort of natural evolution for a lot of written languages. For a more specific example, during the early years of the soviet union when the soviets were encouraging the development of their ethnic minorities(as opposed to kicking them off their land and putting them in work camps as they did a few years later. The Soviet government actually sent linguists out to some of the more nomadic of these groups to develop a written form of their language, which prior to this effort had never existed. That's not even counting resurrected languages which likely bear no significant resemblance to their previous forms, but which are spoken by real live people, or made up languages like Klingon that regular folks .
Languages are both created and naturally evolve, and written languages and spoken languages do not always begin at the same time, are not always used by the same people, and are sometimes rather arbitrary.
While technically most servers are somewhat parallel in nature, it isn't really the same sort of thing that these sorts of languages are designed to achieve.
Servers, for the most part, are parallel because they have to be able to handle a lot of requests simultaneously, so they spin off a new thread or process(depending on the architecture) for each request to the server, do some relatively simple concurrency checking and then run each request, for the most part, in serial. They're parallel because the task being performed is parallel, a web server that could only return the page to one person at a time wouldn't work, not to make them faster or more efficient, or to take advantage of multiple processors. This kind of parallel architecture is relatively simple, because the architecture is defined by the requirements of the project and you just have to ensure that it works.
Taking something like a video encoder, PC game, compiler, etc and making it run in parallel so that it's faster and can take advantage of modern hardware is a totally different kettle of fish. You have to redesign your core idea so that it works in parallel, you have to turn one discrete task into two or more which can be run at the same time. It's a whole different challenge and one which very few programmers(myself included) seem to be prepared to meet.
Mandarin was invented, quite cleverly too(at least the written form).
This is true, but when you're looking at having to generate > 1 attack per second, social engineering isn't going to work. You're better off calling up and saying you've forgotten your password and can they reset it for you.
We can collectively stop answering these things with "don't" when people stop asking questions where it is the most appropriate response.
The answer to this question is definitely "don't".
There are ways to do it, but pretty much all of them involve far more money and/or time than just buying a reasonable PC for his fiancee. Hardware isn't all that expensive and solving a problem like this isn't easy, cheap, or particularly effective.
Slashdot gets a lot of these sorts of questions because for things where the answer is "don't" you generally don't find a lot of useful information from a google search and so people ask here instead. We tell them, don't, which is the best advice they can get.
It's not clear yet what Oracle plans for MySQL, whether they plan to use it to gain market share with companies where an Oracle solution is overkill, whether they're going to use it to create a cheap database appliance, or whether they plan to just scrap it.
Whatever their plans, having every loony in the bin fork the product and basically shatter the brand into a million pieces is probably the best thing they could hope for. Excessive forking, feature divergence and general uncertainty will kill MySQL for professional purposes which is all Oracle really cares about. If they want it dead it'll already be dead and if they want to use it, the "right" fork will be Oracle's.
There, you've just answered the question of the post. He never watched it, I never watched it. For better or worse, lots of people never watched it, the concept failed to grab people's attention. A lot of shows fail that way.
There are plenty of shows that die due to networks not giving them a chance, time slot changes, etc, but sometimes shows just fail because no one tunes in.
I don't blame Nader because the Republicans were in for 8 years, I blame Nader because George Bush was in for 8 years.
Because of that the whole world got stuck in a war that we can't win, and which wasn't any of our business. Because of that science took a back seat to fundamentalist ideology and the crazies too even more of the US. Because of that countries that could be helping make things better economically don't want anything to do with us. Because of that the US has lost almost all of its soft influence with the rest of the world and it will take someone probably greater than Obama promises he will be, which is probably greater than he can be, years to undo that damage.
I don't give a rats that the republicans won, I liked John McCain in 2000(though not in 2008).
I blame Nader because, though he claims to be an environmentalist, he scuppered a candidate who whatever else he might have or would have done, was probably the greatest hope for real positive change for the planet we had. He didn't do that because he had a chance for winning, he did that to because he wanted more money for his political party.
It would have been wonderful to have been able to freely vote for Nader in 2000. I probably would have if I had been free to do so, but eight years of George Bush is a price the US and the world will be paying for decades to come, whether the republicans or democrats(both of whom are still fighting battles that don't meet the needs of the modern world) ever get elected again.
That said, it's still Nader's fault, because despite the faults of the US voting system, Nader knew those faults, and knew exactly what he was doing. He thought that getting more funding for his party was worth 4 years of George Bush and as I recall he didn't even get enough votes to get the extra funding anyway so he shafted us, and everything he stood for for 8 years to prove a point.