maybe you're just confused about what they mean by "object oriented" programming;-P
AC: If you think of an engineering firm building a bridge, they first design it and then build it. Software is not only the design, IT IS THE REAL BRIDGE.
Yes, as you point out, the effort put into software is basically just what engineers would put into making the design of a physical object. No further effort is required to make a billion more bridges. That is a major difference between engineering physical objects and creating software. Since software is like design, that is also why software is like information.
I hope this is a satisfactory answer to your question.
How is it "dishonest" for me to "prefer commercial software" and to not "look for ways to keep from paying other software engineers"?
Well, (remember that I am NOT the person who said it was dishonest) I don't think it is dishonest either.
On the other hand, consider where the money goes when you spend (say) $55 on a piece of packaged software. These are all guestimates, but you could theoretically go out and find the exact numbers:
$2 goes to a shipping company
$10 goes to a retail chain
$3 goes to a packaging company
$5 goes to government (tax)
$1 goes to a media company (for cdroms)
$1 goes to an advertising company
~$33 goes to the company which originally hired x software developers.
This $33 goes into the company balance sheets as revenues, and is further distributed between: shareholders, executives, accountants, overhead (such as heat, electricity, water), support staff, janitorial staff, more taxes, charities, and FINALLY...
maybe $10 goes to software engineers like you.
So you, a software engineer, lost $55, and some software engineers somewhere eventually recovered about $10. That means that the set of all software engineers lost ~$45 on that transaction.
On the other hand, if you kept that money and used open source software to achieve the same purpose (assuming it is even possible to do this), then you pay nothing, but eventually might get the itch to fix bugs (since you are more than capable). You are not obligated to do this, but might decide to do it if you so incline, or if somehow you determine that it is to your advantage (i.e. if you will become 10% more efficient if only a particular bug was fixed). IF you decide to fix a bug, then you are not obligated to share your fix with anyone else, but you might decide to do so out of the desire to give something back, or possibly in order to save yourself the trouble of redoing the change whenever an updated version of the software comes out. What does the software industry lose from that transaction? Nothing, no matter what you do. What do you gain? Roughly equivalent software, some experience, and a sense of accomplishment and community.
In my opinion, there is an open source software economy which operates orthogonally to the "economy" which is described by economists. This is because knowledge (encoded within source code) can be assembled relatively inexpensively, and reproduced for virtually nothing. This makes open source software a perfect candidate for a gift economy.
According to this link "Antelope meat called for a gift economy because it was perishable and there was too much for any one person to eat." We have the same situation with our software and our information today. Information loses relevance (value) over time, so it makes sense to share it with whoever can derive value from it, in the hope that others will do the same with the information that you need. By making open source software available to everyone, everyone wins, including us software engineers.
[A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/article s/A2413-2002Apr29.html"] nonprofits are complaining about how [A HREF="http://www.neustar.us/"]NeuStar Inc.[/A]
registered '.us' names on a first-come, first-served basis.
'While NeuStar did set aside some generic names, such as parks.us
and kids.us, several nonprofit groups accused the company of making
those decisions arbitrarily.' Some of these names have policy implications."[/i]
lemme see... a tag within a tag... and an incorrect end tag.
Some students have been busy answering the very question being asked. They have been evaluating various real time linux versions. Check out this link for more information.
Well.. I know this isn't real-time linux, but it was much more real-time-ish than the vanilla kernel, so I'll just throw in my 2 cents here:
It worked. It worked pretty well. Video performance was very smooth, and over all it was very responsive. Once in a while, vmware would freeze up the entire computer because one of the modules didn't like being pre-empted, when swap was on, but that was pretty much the extent of my trouble.
So assuming that you won't be running vmware with the pre-emptive kernel, based on my solitary account, should should be good to go!
I think that you *could* ask for anything you want. Basically you have the GPL, which offers you certain rights (i.e. the right to sell modified derivatives of the source code, which would otherwise be retained by the copyright holder), in exchange for something. If you take the right to sell modified derivatives of the source code, and the GPL was in place, then you are deemed to have entered into a legally binding contract where you must now live up to your end of the bargain.
has anyone tried to solicit sex in exchange for the source?
Maybe, but this would have certain disadvantages:
it may be illegal to solicit sex in your country, in which case the contract is voidable
even if it worked, you might find it hard to travel to italy for one encounter, to alaska for the next, to jordan for the next...
even if you got around those problems, you are only inviting disaster upon yourself, since each encounter carries a risk of serious infection, and you have a virtual guarantee that no children will result from this in a day and age where contraceptives are available before, during, and up to 6 months after the fact.
All in all, I personally think that you would be better off trying to get money, since with that you can go to the gym, buy nice clothes and a nice car, and live a better life.
ermm.. actually distributing copies is illegal by default under (many or most) copyright laws.
The GPL offers you permission to copy, on the condition that you make the source code available (not necessarily free of charge, but available), and that you distribute the GPL along with the source code.
Either this is a really well-concocted troll, or a corporate marketing department in action.
how many people do you think a large corporation would need to control slashdot moderation? Imagine, reading and posting to slashdot all day with 10-20 ids and getting PAID for it! I want that job!!;-)
Companies don't modify word processors and spreadsheets. They use them.
Companies don't have to modify open-source word processors and spreadsheets. They don't even have to compile them. Source code availability does not imply obligation. It's a legacy that software developers leave behind, kind of like how (monetarily) rich people leave behind museums or scholarships. And source code can be darned useful if there's a particular feature you use 24x7 that needs to be optimised quickly.
Similarly ridiculous is the the claim that there is a real and significant market for software engineers to modify GPL software in general.
This "market" thing is pretty distracting, isn't it? I happen to think that the whole bloody market idea is flawed. Economists continue to get EVERYTHING wrong, EVERY SINGLE DAY. It isn't even funny how much of a scam it is.
this verse by Pastor Martin Niem?ler
... is more applicable to DMCA and the Software License "Police" who go around ransacking schools who want to migrate away from Microsoft software...
For that reason, I hope that it continues to enjoy commercial success and that any competitor that may someday supplant it is also a commercial software product.
Well, if the required functionality can be obtained for free, I prefer free.
Is it really that wrong to ask a software development company to pay money for all the bleeding edge tools that make their work so much easier?
Well... I for one, DO take moral issue with the way that bundled software can be developed once but then (theoretically) sold forever. In what way is developing software _so_ much more noble than, say, farming or baking, that the rewards should be so much higher? Heck, to compare apples with apples, why not look at physicians. They certainly go to school for as long as computer scientists (longer!), but does a surgeon get paid forever if he/she develops (in finite time) a new way to fix knees?
If software is developed "as a service", then I for one think that there should be a fixed and finite charge for the service, since no matter how many people might benefit, the person or people performing the service only do it once (per software package).
what an unfortunate choice of words... I'm sorry I read this message, since I don't particularly want to associate a license which GRANTS rights which would otherwise be denied under copyright and ENABLES developers around the world to work together to do something good for the world with (let me put that word far beneath the rest of this message...)
If it takes a spammer an hour to send a message to a person, they've lost and we've won. Hell, if it takes a spammer one minute to send a message to someone, we've won. Spammers are sending out something like a million messages each time, and each run needs to be done in a few hours.
I agree with you at least this much.
So, you're assuming spammers are sniffing your email and finding out not only the names and address of your friends, but what headers they send with their message, and searching until they find an open relay within the right subnet so they can send using the same SMTP server as your friend?
ArggggghhhhH!!! NO! I said already (several times) that I come on the side of not particularly caring if I get spam. Bandwidth isn't even an issue for me since newer clients (like the newest kmail) can filter based on subject and sender while the email is _still on the server_.
All I want from my email is to know (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the person who sent it to me is the person I think it is. I also want to know (beyond a reasonable doubt) that it would be impossible for another person to forge an email from me to someone else without that email being red-flagged as suspicious.
However, if the above properties were true of email, it would be very hard for spammers who send gazillions of anonymous emails to get any attention, since those emails could be sent into an "anonymous" pile which rarely gets looked at (since it's full of spam).
The other emails are PGP verified in a way that should not reveal the email address doing the verifying, eg. the final server could verify the authenticity of each incoming email, valid or invalid, and modify the headers to reflect the authenticity of lack thereof.
Once a client receives an email, one of the things it would be able to do is look at the headers to see if the email is valid or invalid, and react accordingly by sorting or doing whatever user-defined action it is supposed to do. Older clients can hopefully just ignore the strange new header.
If a person reading an email is particularly interested in knowing if an email is valid or invalid (i.e. if they think the server might have made a mistake, or they don't trust the server), the person can click on a button that checks the authenticity of that message manually. The other thing that the person can do now (which they couldn't do before because of anonymous emails) is COMPLAIN about the unsolicited email, and have a solid line of accountability leading straight back to the spammer's server.
At the very least, the problem for spammers would have moved from finding open smtp relays to finding open httpd servers (much harder to find)....
it's trivially easy to figure out if an email is from someone you know just by looking at the headers
ermm.. not really. maybe i'm just paranoid, but AFAIK the best headers can do for you (without disruptively contacting system administrators to discover mac addresses) is narrow down the subnet that the message came from. Most ISP's that i am aware of have open smtp relays within their subnets.. i.e. anyone within the subnet could pretend to be anyone else within the subnet and nobody could know the difference.
Granted that most Outlook-using users and spammers wouldn't have a clue how to do this, but anyone who can understand the command-line syntax for sendmail can do pretty much whatever they please.
Ahh.. but I said earlier that spam was really a non-issue for me. The reason is that I get so much legitimate mail that spam becomes white noise which is easy to filter & delete without thought, and it is quite easy to set up individual rules in kmail (or whatever you use) to filter out, say, anything from the.cn domain if you know that no chinese mail to you is going to be legitimate (eg. if you don't speak chinese).
And you are exactly right about keeping a list of valid PGP signatures, since the one thing I don't want a spammer (or con artist) to be able to do is fake being someone I know and trust.
What? are you upset that there are two sides to every story? Not just the One Microsoft Way(tm).
ok.. maybe the headlines are not so biased after all.. i thought it would be obvious that they seem to favour microsoft, but obviously you think otherwise.
Quick factual question for you. Which side of this particular story has recently been convicted of abusing a monoploy in the desktop pc OS market?
No it was with George Puil (who received a generous donation of topsoil from other citizens who think the same thing as me), acting under instructions from his newly appointed boss.
And you mention education, keeping money from the school system is far worse for the students than it is to raise their tuition by 10-20%.
That is misguided and also wrong. First the assumption that there are only two choices is oversimplified, since there are other sources of money other than the (i guess you agree) tight-fisted provincial government. Second, students are already staggering under more debt than ever before, and the general population is not doing much better. Most students are forced to do the same thing that the government would do: BORROW THE MONEY. And it is pretty easy to verify (by being a student) that the student loan option really covers only a small portion of the actual expenses, forcing students who go this route to try to work 10 to 25 hours per week while studying, which is not optimal at all, even as they continue to amass debt.
And before you start on this the economy is far worst now than under the NDP remember there was no economy when they were in power.
Yes there was an economy, which favoured individuals and families over businesses and government. Now it is very much the opposite. And IMO, most of this "economy" bullshit is just that: bullshit.
BTW the judiciary is already running this province, and that is no better than communism.
well... from my point of view it really seems that it is better to keep the legal system away from politics and elections... just look south to see the alternative, and i don't think it's better.
Copied from right below the article are other titles from the same publisher. Judge for yourself.
more from FT.com
Gates gives cool performance in court
Gates seeks redemption on witness stand
Gates takes the stand with a grin of defiance
Analysis: Microsoft's big bet
Microsoft offers tepid forecast for IT sector
Microsoft cuts Xbox price in Europe
Microsoft wrestles with PC demographics
Microsoft prepares to take the stand
Special report: Microsoft's antitrust battle
Microsoft's share price
I think that while it is valiant of ISP's to try to block spam as early as possible, it goes against their duty to provide an unfiltered connection. Furthermore, clients might actually _like_ to receive spam (like the guy who actually replies), or be friends with lots of spammers, or just generally not have an objection to spam.
That said, I also think that all emails should be PGP signed, and all emails that fail in THAT regard should be summarily filtered... (of course the process to get there could be as gradual as having the email client flag unsigned messages as "suspicious", yadayadayada... so as not to shock the masses with a sudden change... blah blah)
OK, you're right. I finally found it in the third entry of WordNet (r) 1.6, although a bunch of other dictionaries didn't carry this meaning at all...
3: a politically organized body of people under a single government; "the state has elected a new president" [syn: nation, country, land, commonwealth, res publica, body politic]
The blame lies squarely on people NOT MAINTINAING THEIR OWN MACHINES.
Okay, I can see your point, sort of. However, I don't think the recall notice was very widely publicised, or that most people running their copy of IIS even knew that it was running...
Microsoft THEN took steps by turning Windows Update on, by default, in XP Home, and, predictably, everybody started crying because it's an invasion of privacy, and it takes choice away from the user.
Yeah.. I was reading the paltalk.com website, and they've got this cool chat thing which my mother in law wanted installed on her machine (win95, and for some reason paltalk crashes whenever we want to join a group on that machine)... anyway the point is that paltalk.com says that for windows XP some users will need to remove the built-in firewall. The website then gives explicit instructions on how to perform this operation, with absolutely no warning to the user that this may reduce security, etc...
So I can just imagine millions of paltalk users dutifully configuring their XP machines to work properly with paltalk, and having absolutely no idea that they are putting their computers at risk of being hacked.
So it doesn't seem too far out of line for Microsoft to put in auto-updates to protect users a little bit from themselves...
But let us be realistic... at the end of the day, getting hacked will at worst bring you to a re-install and recover from your last backup, and maybe lose some information to someone who probably doesn't know what to do with it...
... getting audited can set you back over $500,000, as some schools are finding out in the US right now. Being safe from audits is IMO a big part of security that often gets ignored.
Yep.. There was this awful thing called "Code Red" which was crippling the WHOLE Internet, but luckily Microsoft released a patch which administrators need to install on their computers which will make them secure against this menace. Even the normally sane'ish CBC was towing this line. No mention of the fact that not everybody runs windows on their computers, that Macintosh users were completely immune, that Linux/BSD/Anything but Microsoft(tm) was completely immune to this IIS exploit.
The "experts" completely forgot to mention that the well-known nature of the problem, or that these issues are common in Microsoft software, or that Microsoft is not the only producer of web server software so that people who chose not to use Microsoft's products are not affected. It was as though the "experts" had no conception of the possibility that people might not be running Microsoft this and that.
The day Code Red became public should have been a public relations problem for Microsoft. It was a problem with THEIR CODE. Instead, they were portrayed as the Saviors of the Internet, as shining beacons of good corporate citizenship.
Money can't buy everything, but it can sure buy the media.
Slashdot Mirror
hmm.. sounds like a font was missing in XP, and the nearest font replacement in XP was missing in windows 2000... didja try changing the font?
software:
/friendscomputer/usr/local/bin/bridge
;-P
cp bridge
information:
copy bridgearticle15.doc d:\bridgearticle15.doc
maybe you're just confused about what they mean by "object oriented" programming
AC: If you think of an engineering firm building a bridge, they first design it and then build it. Software is not only the design, IT IS THE REAL BRIDGE.
Yes, as you point out, the effort put into software is basically just what engineers would put into making the design of a physical object. No further effort is required to make a billion more bridges. That is a major difference between engineering physical objects and creating software. Since software is like design, that is also why software is like information.
I hope this is a satisfactory answer to your question.
Cheers,
How is it "dishonest" for me to "prefer commercial software" and to not "look for ways to keep from paying other software engineers"?
Well, (remember that I am NOT the person who said it was dishonest) I don't think it is dishonest either.
On the other hand, consider where the money goes when you spend (say) $55 on a piece of packaged software. These are all guestimates, but you could theoretically go out and find the exact numbers:
$2 goes to a shipping company
$10 goes to a retail chain
$3 goes to a packaging company
$5 goes to government (tax)
$1 goes to a media company (for cdroms)
$1 goes to an advertising company
~$33 goes to the company which originally hired x software developers.
This $33 goes into the company balance sheets as revenues, and is further distributed between: shareholders, executives, accountants, overhead (such as heat, electricity, water), support staff, janitorial staff, more taxes, charities, and FINALLY...
maybe $10 goes to software engineers like you.
So you, a software engineer, lost $55, and some software engineers somewhere eventually recovered about $10. That means that the set of all software engineers lost ~$45 on that transaction.
On the other hand, if you kept that money and used open source software to achieve the same purpose (assuming it is even possible to do this), then you pay nothing, but eventually might get the itch to fix bugs (since you are more than capable). You are not obligated to do this, but might decide to do it if you so incline, or if somehow you determine that it is to your advantage (i.e. if you will become 10% more efficient if only a particular bug was fixed). IF you decide to fix a bug, then you are not obligated to share your fix with anyone else, but you might decide to do so out of the desire to give something back, or possibly in order to save yourself the trouble of redoing the change whenever an updated version of the software comes out. What does the software industry lose from that transaction? Nothing, no matter what you do. What do you gain? Roughly equivalent software, some experience, and a sense of accomplishment and community.
In my opinion, there is an open source software economy which operates orthogonally to the "economy" which is described by economists. This is because knowledge (encoded within source code) can be assembled relatively inexpensively, and reproduced for virtually nothing. This makes open source software a perfect candidate for a gift economy.
According to this link "Antelope meat called for a gift economy because it was perishable and there was too much for any one person to eat." We have the same situation with our software and our information today. Information loses relevance (value) over time, so it makes sense to share it with whoever can derive value from it, in the hope that others will do the same with the information that you need. By making open source software available to everyone, everyone wins, including us software engineers.
[A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/article s/A2413-2002Apr29.html"]
nonprofits are complaining about how
[A HREF="http://www.neustar.us/"]NeuStar Inc.[/A]
registered '.us' names on a first-come, first-served basis.
'While NeuStar did set aside some generic names, such as parks.us
and kids.us, several nonprofit groups accused the company of making
those decisions arbitrarily.' Some of these names have policy implications."[/i]
lemme see... a tag within a tag... and an incorrect end tag.
tsk.tsk..
Some students have been busy answering the very question being asked. They have been evaluating various real time linux versions. Check out this link for more information.
Here's another useful article called 'The Real-time Linux Software Quick Reference Guide'
This web site might be helpful. Report on the 2nd Real-Time Linux Workshop.
Well.. I know this isn't real-time linux, but it was much more real-time-ish than the vanilla kernel, so I'll just throw in my 2 cents here:
;-)
It worked. It worked pretty well. Video performance was very smooth, and over all it was very responsive. Once in a while, vmware would freeze up the entire computer because one of the modules didn't like being pre-empted, when swap was on, but that was pretty much the extent of my trouble.
So assuming that you won't be running vmware with the pre-emptive kernel, based on my solitary account, should should be good to go!
can you insist the payments are made in rubels?
I think that you *could* ask for anything you want. Basically you have the GPL, which offers you certain rights (i.e. the right to sell modified derivatives of the source code, which would otherwise be retained by the copyright holder), in exchange for something. If you take the right to sell modified derivatives of the source code, and the GPL was in place, then you are deemed to have entered into a legally binding contract where you must now live up to your end of the bargain.
has anyone tried to solicit sex in exchange for the source?
Maybe, but this would have certain disadvantages:
All in all, I personally think that you would be better off trying to get money, since with that you can go to the gym, buy nice clothes and a nice car, and live a better life.
ermm.. actually distributing copies is illegal by default under (many or most) copyright laws.
The GPL offers you permission to copy, on the condition that you make the source code available (not necessarily free of charge, but available), and that you distribute the GPL along with the source code.
Either this is a really well-concocted troll, or a corporate marketing department in action.
;-)
how many people do you think a large corporation would need to control slashdot moderation? Imagine, reading and posting to slashdot all day with 10-20 ids and getting PAID for it! I want that job!!
Companies don't modify word processors and spreadsheets. They use them.
... is more applicable to DMCA and the Software License "Police" who go around ransacking schools who want to migrate away from Microsoft software...
Companies don't have to modify open-source word processors and spreadsheets. They don't even have to compile them. Source code availability does not imply obligation. It's a legacy that software developers leave behind, kind of like how (monetarily) rich people leave behind museums or scholarships. And source code can be darned useful if there's a particular feature you use 24x7 that needs to be optimised quickly.
Similarly ridiculous is the the claim that there is a real and significant market for software engineers to modify GPL software in general.
This "market" thing is pretty distracting, isn't it? I happen to think that the whole bloody market idea is flawed. Economists continue to get EVERYTHING wrong, EVERY SINGLE DAY. It isn't even funny how much of a scam it is.
this verse by Pastor Martin Niem?ler
For that reason, I hope that it continues to enjoy commercial success and that any competitor that may someday supplant it is also a commercial software product.
Well, if the required functionality can be obtained for free, I prefer free.
Is it really that wrong to ask a software development company to pay money for all the bleeding edge tools that make their work so much easier?
Well... I for one, DO take moral issue with the way that bundled software can be developed once but then (theoretically) sold forever. In what way is developing software _so_ much more noble than, say, farming or baking, that the rewards should be so much higher? Heck, to compare apples with apples, why not look at physicians. They certainly go to school for as long as computer scientists (longer!), but does a surgeon get paid forever if he/she develops (in finite time) a new way to fix knees?
If software is developed "as a service", then I for one think that there should be a fixed and finite charge for the service, since no matter how many people might benefit, the person or people performing the service only do it once (per software package).
doesn't ****** the other code
what an unfortunate choice of words... I'm sorry I read this message, since I don't particularly want to associate a license which GRANTS rights which would otherwise be denied under copyright and ENABLES developers around the world to work together to do something good for the world with (let me put that word far beneath the rest of this message...)
"infection".
(warning, I reordered your message a little bit)
If it takes a spammer an hour to send a message to a person, they've lost and we've won. Hell, if it takes a spammer one minute to send a message to someone, we've won. Spammers are sending out something like a million messages each time, and each run needs to be done in a few hours.
I agree with you at least this much.
So, you're assuming spammers are sniffing your email and finding out not only the names and address of your friends, but what headers they send with their message, and searching until they find an open relay within the right subnet so they can send using the same SMTP server as your friend?
ArggggghhhhH!!! NO! I said already (several times) that I come on the side of not particularly caring if I get spam. Bandwidth isn't even an issue for me since newer clients (like the newest kmail) can filter based on subject and sender while the email is _still on the server_.
All I want from my email is to know (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the person who sent it to me is the person I think it is. I also want to know (beyond a reasonable doubt) that it would be impossible for another person to forge an email from me to someone else without that email being red-flagged as suspicious.
However, if the above properties were true of email, it would be very hard for spammers who send gazillions of anonymous emails to get any attention, since those emails could be sent into an "anonymous" pile which rarely gets looked at (since it's full of spam).
The other emails are PGP verified in a way that should not reveal the email address doing the verifying, eg. the final server could verify the authenticity of each incoming email, valid or invalid, and modify the headers to reflect the authenticity of lack thereof.
Once a client receives an email, one of the things it would be able to do is look at the headers to see if the email is valid or invalid, and react accordingly by sorting or doing whatever user-defined action it is supposed to do. Older clients can hopefully just ignore the strange new header. If a person reading an email is particularly interested in knowing if an email is valid or invalid (i.e. if they think the server might have made a mistake, or they don't trust the server), the person can click on a button that checks the authenticity of that message manually. The other thing that the person can do now (which they couldn't do before because of anonymous emails) is COMPLAIN about the unsolicited email, and have a solid line of accountability leading straight back to the spammer's server.
At the very least, the problem for spammers would have moved from finding open smtp relays to finding open httpd servers (much harder to find)....
it's trivially easy to figure out if an email is from someone you know just by looking at the headers
ermm.. not really. maybe i'm just paranoid, but AFAIK the best headers can do for you (without disruptively contacting system administrators to discover mac addresses) is narrow down the subnet that the message came from. Most ISP's that i am aware of have open smtp relays within their subnets.. i.e. anyone within the subnet could pretend to be anyone else within the subnet and nobody could know the difference.
Granted that most Outlook-using users and spammers wouldn't have a clue how to do this, but anyone who can understand the command-line syntax for sendmail can do pretty much whatever they please.
Ahh.. but I said earlier that spam was really a non-issue for me. The reason is that I get so much legitimate mail that spam becomes white noise which is easy to filter & delete without thought, and it is quite easy to set up individual rules in kmail (or whatever you use) to filter out, say, anything from the .cn domain if you know that no chinese mail to you is going to be legitimate (eg. if you don't speak chinese).
And you are exactly right about keeping a list of valid PGP signatures, since the one thing I don't want a spammer (or con artist) to be able to do is fake being someone I know and trust.
hmm... whoever moderated the parent to 5 and grandparent to 1 "Troll"? weird.
What? are you upset that there are two sides to every story? Not just the One Microsoft Way(tm).
ok.. maybe the headlines are not so biased after all.. i thought it would be obvious that they seem to favour microsoft, but obviously you think otherwise.
Quick factual question for you. Which side of this particular story has recently been convicted of abusing a monoploy in the desktop pc OS market?
Microsoft's side.
The Bus strike was with the previous government
No it was with George Puil (who received a generous donation of topsoil from other citizens who think the same thing as me), acting under instructions from his newly appointed boss.
And you mention education, keeping money from the school system is far worse for the students than it is to raise their tuition by 10-20%.
That is misguided and also wrong. First the assumption that there are only two choices is oversimplified, since there are other sources of money other than the (i guess you agree) tight-fisted provincial government. Second, students are already staggering under more debt than ever before, and the general population is not doing much better. Most students are forced to do the same thing that the government would do: BORROW THE MONEY. And it is pretty easy to verify (by being a student) that the student loan option really covers only a small portion of the actual expenses, forcing students who go this route to try to work 10 to 25 hours per week while studying, which is not optimal at all, even as they continue to amass debt.
And before you start on this the economy is far worst now than under the NDP remember there was no economy when they were in power.
Yes there was an economy, which favoured individuals and families over businesses and government. Now it is very much the opposite. And IMO, most of this "economy" bullshit is just that: bullshit.
BTW the judiciary is already running this province, and that is no better than communism.
well... from my point of view it really seems that it is better to keep the legal system away from politics and elections... just look south to see the alternative, and i don't think it's better.
Copied from right below the article are other titles from the same publisher. Judge for yourself.
more from FT.com
Gates gives cool performance in court
Gates seeks redemption on witness stand
Gates takes the stand with a grin of defiance
Analysis: Microsoft's big bet
Microsoft offers tepid forecast for IT sector
Microsoft cuts Xbox price in Europe
Microsoft wrestles with PC demographics
Microsoft prepares to take the stand
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I think that while it is valiant of ISP's to try to block spam as early as possible, it goes against their duty to provide an unfiltered connection. Furthermore, clients might actually _like_ to receive spam (like the guy who actually replies), or be friends with lots of spammers, or just generally not have an objection to spam.
That said, I also think that all emails should be PGP signed, and all emails that fail in THAT regard should be summarily filtered... (of course the process to get there could be as gradual as having the email client flag unsigned messages as "suspicious", yadayadayada... so as not to shock the masses with a sudden change... blah blah)
bluGill Said: The definition of State is country.
OK, you're right. I finally found it in the third entry of WordNet (r) 1.6, although a bunch of other dictionaries didn't carry this meaning at all...
3: a politically organized body of people under a single government; "the state has elected a new president" [syn: nation, country, land, commonwealth, res publica, body politic]
The blame lies squarely on people NOT MAINTINAING THEIR OWN MACHINES.
... getting audited can set you back over $500,000, as some schools are finding out in the US right now. Being safe from audits is IMO a big part of security that often gets ignored.
Okay, I can see your point, sort of. However, I don't think the recall notice was very widely publicised, or that most people running their copy of IIS even knew that it was running...
Microsoft THEN took steps by turning Windows Update on, by default, in XP Home, and, predictably, everybody started crying because it's an invasion of privacy, and it takes choice away from the user.
Yeah.. I was reading the paltalk.com website, and they've got this cool chat thing which my mother in law wanted installed on her machine (win95, and for some reason paltalk crashes whenever we want to join a group on that machine)... anyway the point is that paltalk.com says that for windows XP some users will need to remove the built-in firewall. The website then gives explicit instructions on how to perform this operation, with absolutely no warning to the user that this may reduce security, etc...
So I can just imagine millions of paltalk users dutifully configuring their XP machines to work properly with paltalk, and having absolutely no idea that they are putting their computers at risk of being hacked.
So it doesn't seem too far out of line for Microsoft to put in auto-updates to protect users a little bit from themselves...
But let us be realistic... at the end of the day, getting hacked will at worst bring you to a re-install and recover from your last backup, and maybe lose some information to someone who probably doesn't know what to do with it...
Yep.. There was this awful thing called "Code Red" which was crippling the WHOLE Internet, but luckily Microsoft released a patch which administrators need to install on their computers which will make them secure against this menace. Even the normally sane'ish CBC was towing this line. No mention of the fact that not everybody runs windows on their computers, that Macintosh users were completely immune, that Linux/BSD/Anything but Microsoft(tm) was completely immune to this IIS exploit.
The "experts" completely forgot to mention that the well-known nature of the problem, or that these issues are common in Microsoft software, or that Microsoft is not the only producer of web server software so that people who chose not to use Microsoft's products are not affected. It was as though the "experts" had no conception of the possibility that people might not be running Microsoft this and that.
The day Code Red became public should have been a public relations problem for Microsoft. It was a problem with THEIR CODE. Instead, they were portrayed as the Saviors of the Internet, as shining beacons of good corporate citizenship.
Money can't buy everything, but it can sure buy the media.