The problem, ultimately, is that showing the page you are looking for, plus or minus two pages, is often all the pages you need to see for a great many bookes e.g. books that are randomly accessed in a reference fashion. As an example of this, my girlfriend routinely searches cookbooks online using this very feature. It shows her the recipe she was looking for from an expensive cookbook, and plus or minus a couple pages, which means she gets the entire recipes -- the primary benefit of the book -- online for free. And she uses this as an example of why her publishing houses won't participate.
Surely though this is the minority case and is fairly unique to reference books, which have already had their market pretty much hammered by the web anyway. I'd say that many many people would just keep googling until they found the recipe they wanted and would never be in the market for a recipe book themselves anyway.
As a self-appointed expert in these areas I would imagine that recipe book purchases are in fact a lifestyle purchase - people buy them because they a) look great on their kitchen shelves, b) have a picture of some sleek cooking goddess like Nigella who you might like to give it to over the sink, etc. etc. Can't imagine many people rush out and buy them in order to get a recipe for making salmon souffle.
On the other hand I read a lot of history and this would positively make me buy more books - triggered by a relevant excert I saw on the web. No way would I read a big history book on a computer. I don't buy encyclopedias, recipe books or dictionaries anyway.
You used the word "interesting" and in my experience that is the key. I can see some applications for this - even though perhaps they are based on what I would like this to be, rather than (since I did not RTFA) what is is....
My company, for example, sells a fairly complex piece of HR software. It has a hideously large (structured!) database that captures just about everything.
Reporting, for us, is a big, big deal. Customers are constantly demanding more insight into their broken business processes.
The problem we have in satisfying this (apart from the fact that all customers are different) is the sequential nature of developing useful reports. You build one, only to find that it identifies another, more interesting, area to report on, so you cycle around again. Each cycle takes quite a while, by the time you've written SQL and then loaded the resulting report data into the pox-ridden beast that is Excel (I guess there are other tools we could use to speed things up, but I think the SQL seems to have to be hand-written).
If this tool can produce "interesting" visualisations, without the need to think too much, that would be very useful.
Analogy-wise, I am walking around in a forest of data. I know there is interesting stuff to be seen, but I don't want to have to dig it out, I want it to stand out in the same way my eye is alerted at the pattern of a beautiful butterfly sitting on a tree - even if I though I was looking for leaf patterns.
If the tool handled this kind of thing then yes, $1000 per seat is easily in the ballpark, or more.
The classic Word vs. OpenOffice faceoff. Happens in our office every few months (substitute other MS vs. open source productivity tools here if you like):
PHB: Hey Jake, can you get me that stuff I need for the proposal. The customer wants it in MS Word form this time - they had a little trouble reading your last piece. I need it this afternoon, big rush. OSZ (Open Source Zealot): Yeah, sure, I'll do it in OpenOffice and flash it straight to you. PHB: Look, I've got nothing against open source, I just don't use OpenOffice. I tried it ages ago, and then again a few months ago. No matter what they say, there's always some little incompatibility that ends up costing you hours. OSZ: No, that was the older versions. The new OpenOffice rocks, its absolutely compatible with Word. PHB: I don't care, I just don't trust it. Just use Word to write the document, OK? OSZ: [sullenly] If you say so.
[.. hours pass..]
OSZ: I've got that document you wanted. But I..ahhh.. couldn't use Word, I used OpenOffice. I can't run Word on my machine any more. But look, I can absolutely, 100% guarantee that OpenOffice is 100% compatible with Word, it'll work fine!!! PHB: [sullenly] Oh shit. OK. Just frigging mail it to me then.
[.. more hours pass..]
PHB: [spitting fire] F*&$! That fricking OpenOffice crap has polluted my Word document! All the tables have got some kind of hidden formatting in them that makes them 6 inches high and I can't edit them. I need to get this to the customer IN SIXTEEN FUCKING MINUTES!! GET THAT FRICKING OPENOFFICE OUT OF THE FRICKING OFFICE YOU FRICKING ASSHOLE!!!!!! OSZ: I don't know what happened there. That was all fixed up I thought. But look, hey, the next version really does give you absolutely 100% compatibility!!
Why do so many people around here seem to think that Java is more free than.Net? This is far from true.
This academic argument gets trotted out over and over again, and its just as unconvincing every time.
Back here in the real world, where MS holds sway, the way things go is that if you write your code to run on an MS platform, then every single time someone runs it, MS's cash register gives out a big KA-CHIIING !!!!
But if you write it to run on Java, then that does not have to happen. It may do, but people have options.
So respectfully, Java is way, way more free than.Net.
And the second front, equally important: Until the rules change in our favor, we need to build up a portfolio of patents, to share and trade with our friends (which anyone in business will tell you is the true purpose of a patent).
Sinking to everyone else's level may not be the best, or even a practical option.
A seldom-mentioned way to defeat patents is just to publish your work and place it in the public domain. This creates the prior art which can be used to strike down patents in the future.
The main problem is, of course, that most peoiple don't want to publish their work, they want to keep it locked up and secret. Thus this avenue is not open to most commercial software firms. They are forced into the patents arms race.
Open source is exempt from this problem. The best way to defeat patents is for there to be a published open source version of the "invention" (and I use the word with wry amusement) which pre-dates any patents. There is no need to go to the hassle and expense of actually procuring a patent.
No offense and in the nicest possible way but you seem the classic open source bigot who this guy was addressing; you display an intensely self-obsessed whining and an inability to view the world from anything but your own tiny perspective.
"People who receive this treatment are generally whining or complaining. That's a way to shrug them off, because developers have no time to waste with such people. ".
In a nutshell, you gave an example of the very point the author was making. When developers don't care about a user's complaints, then they are no longer aiming at building something of usefulness to others but instead are scratching their own itch. I know it burns when people complain about your creations. Why, they're as good as challening you as a person aren't they! Get over it pal. I'm sure you're a magnificently gifted contributor to your own itch, but are you creating things for other people? A resounding NO based on your response.
I don't know whats funnier. That the faintest sign that you are a female triggers a sexual frenzy in some sad geekboy who's only contact with such exotic creatures is lusting after the girl in the drive-thru Macs where he eats, or that you are almost certainly not a girl anyway.
Re:SCOX at $5.15 - Where's the bottom
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Groklaw Turns One
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When you buy a company, you aquire its assets and its debts and liabilities. Buying them out before all the legal battles are over would be foolish, and afterwards I doubt that there will be much left.
True, but with an important twist - the upside is unlimited if your skanky lawsuits are successful, but if you lose, the downside is limited to your investment - you simply fold up the company.
That is both the beauty, and the curse, of the capitalist system and of corporations.
I think you've done all you can. I would even go so far as to say that you've answered your own question....It's not like you can do anything else.
No disrespect but you talk like an employee, not someone who cares. Imagine your liveliehood depends on keeping your company - which sends out hundreds of thousands of valid, asked for emails per day - running so you can feed your brood and keep a roof over. Thats how I'm thinking while reading these posts. I'm guessing if you really cared you would have a more constructive comment to make.
I'm very much pro-technology....But electronic money scares me.
Ha ha, very amusing, swapping electronic money for electronic voting.
And you make a good point, but the differences are:
There are thousands of highly motivated individuals working for many different organisations, with many different agendas, all looking at electronic money transactions in the micro and macro senses. Any anomalies would be found (and are from time to time). By contrast vote tallying is a very guarded process participated in only by people approved by a single entity. If that entity fails there is no other to fall back on.
Someone hacking the electronic money systems of the world means, at worst, that you are financially ruined. Someone hacking the voting systems of the world means that you, at worst, finish up wearing a yellow star on your jacket and meeting your end in an oven (Yes, I know that Hitler was voted in legitimitely, but you get the point).
From what I can make out (could be wrong) it blasts out a myriad of possible branches and loops that appear to be program logic but are actually executed solely to confuse the reverse engineer.
If so, this raises a couple of issues:
Code bloat - very much an issue for a technology targetting client-side apps; and
It negates Cringley's open source point:
And there is even an Open Source aspect to this new form of protection: It can be used as a new form of attribution. Who wrote what part of that Open Source program? Copyright notices and comments can be removed, but the PSCP code renaming signature can't be.
Open source code which can only submitted while obfuscated (thus preserving its signature) is not open source any more, so I don't buy this as a benefit of the technology.
I think the main dangers to people protecting their source code in the medium term will remain what they are now:
Incompetence and conspiracy from within (witness the win2k code leakage)
IBM may be doing us a favor by getting it. This blocks hostile companies from aquiring them.
Once upon a time, not so long ago (well, 15 years or so ago, when I was last an IBM-er), IBM were considered the devil incarnate by the rest of the industry. Certainly not as ruthless as Microsoft, but by no means an altruistic benefactor of society.
IBM was famous for FUD, in fact the term may well have been first put forward about them. The mere threat of new products and technologies from IBM could chill the market.
The last real incident of this that I remember was when IBM introduced the PS2. It came with the revolutionary new MCA bus. The PC add-on board makers screamed that IBM was going to decimate them, and may struggled to produce boards using the new bus. In fact, those that stuck with ISA (?) were the smart ones as the market has by this time overtaken IBM even though they didn't yet realise it.
I don't think of IBM as a "non-hostile" - just as one with very smart PR and an understanding that they will never again be a force in the PC operating system market, so their best tactic, since they can't have it, is to make sure no-one else (Microsoft) has it either. Kind of like pissing in the well if you can't drink from it.
Yeah the fire bombing of Dresden by British and American forces was indeed heoric.. murdering innocent civilians in the thousands - knowingly, on purpose.
Those acts were horrific but they were carried out with the intent of shortening the war by breaking the morale of those civilians and others in other German towns and cities who heard about them.
Many hundreds of thousands of civilians were indeed killed by those raids, but during the day those same "innocent civilians" were out making bombs, planes and tanks in Germany's armament factories. Pretty much all males in Germany from age 14 upwards (though much less so females), including millions of slave labourers impotred from the occupied countries, spent their entire days directly supporting Germany's war effort. Bombing them was a valid action of war that resulted in a lower overall loss of life. And no matter how you cut it, given that the Germans started the whole thing off, it was better to kill them than be killed by them.
No doubt Novell, IBM et al have made these funds knowing full well that SCO will never see any of that money because they will never really challenge anyone in court if they can help it.
IBM and Novell want to see this SCO bullshit hit the courts as soon as possible. What they don't want is this albatross hanging around the necks of their linux business. Up until now, SCO could just sit there and let the FUD fester - now IBM and Novell have neutralised the FUD.
The key to understanding all of these corporate moves is always to put yourself in the shoes of the person who has to answer the questions from the god-like beings in the boardroom. YOu can tell them until you're blue in the face that SCO's antics are bullshit - all they think about is the risk of THEM being sued because someone talked them into using that crazy commie software.
Now you can say to them "Don't worry, IBM will lend us their lawyers if it does come to a fight".
The turd that is SCO has been dislodged and is starting its long slow slide down the crapper.
Both your post and your "new friend's" post make it fairly obvious you are still youngsters who suffer from the delusion that you are epxerts and everyone else on the roads is a dick. You probably have Metallica blaring from your speakers most of the time, lank greasy hair and a dog with a studded collar barking in the back.
Strangely, this really will pass once you reach more mature years. Perhaps mid-30s, thats when it came for me. Up until then I too was convinced that accelerating my way out of situations was a vital - and frequently used - defensive driving strategy. Strangely enough, after having kids and suddenly having to really think about safety for others in my car, not just me, I adopted a whole new (and much slower) way of driving. Since then, I have never - not once - had to speed up to get out of a dangerous situation. Ad mittedly I don't spend much time driving through neighbourhoods of rampaging out-of-control rednecks as you seem to (WHY ??).
I accept that speeding up to exit a bad situation is a valid option that I might use again one day. But personally, I'd be prepared to let the cops have their tractor beam to stop the shithead who is screaming at 100mph through the street where I live and where kids play, if the downside was that theoretically they might turn it on me one day (I agree with you though that I don't want any AI in my car making that decision).
Parent post is 100% correct. If there is no IE support, this is as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike, except for hobby uses, or just possibly, deployment of intranet applications to a closed community of users.
Given that it is possible to write such applications using standard HTML (though no-one would claim it is easy), why on earth would anyone produce this (very much needed) solution in a way that guarantees it will only ever be of academic interest.
We had to build something exactly like this ourselves. It would have cost over $500K in internal costs. It is great, and helps us build our app, but it is pure enabling technology and I would love to be able to use a well-supported framework instead.
But anything that doesn't support IE is dead in the water. Microsoft will do everything in their power to make sure it does not fly on IE.
This is a common refrain I think from looking at other threads, but I think you would be better served by either:
a) also being wiling to accept other people's hardware - as someone else said, its often easier to give machines (even modern ones) than money; and/or
b) explaining why you need $20K worth of kit. I agree with others that this is a LOT of hardware.
We run some very critical Oracle/Java/Apache systems for our customers and it all happens on Dell PowerEdge servers. The last (and most expensive) machine we bought was about $3K, with dual CPUs, RAID storage, I think 4Gb of memory. To me, you are asking for the money to buy 7 of these.
Oh yeah, and $20K sounds suspiciously like a round number pulled from the air:)
But apple in no way wants to negotiate with 1,000's of independent artists. They are not a record label. They don't have talent scouts. They want a record company to do all that work for them.
Yep, this is basically what Jobs said in an interview - that the only thing the record companies CAN do well is identify and nurture talent (if shafting them up the ass can be considered nurturing I guess).
That does sound too simple though, and I think Jobs is being economical with the truth. There are doubtless plenty of individuals around who can identify talent - e.g., all those individuals currently employed by the record companies.
What he's really saying is that the record companies can both identify talent, and also, because of their market clout, they can legitimise, brainwash kids with it, turn it into the mainstream.
Pretty soon Apple will have that market clout, even if right now they don't have the talent spotters.
So, yeah, I agree with the grandparent post, some time in the not too distant future, Apple will start working directly with the artists themselves and cutting out the middlemen.
Perhaps the end game is that the record companies become "hollowed out" and their talent scouts, lawyers, publicists etc. become hired guns for the new distributors - like Apple. Once that happens, expect to find your neighbourhood CD shop has morphed into a cafe/listening joint with CD burners in the corners.
You see, when "Grandma Smith" realizes that AOL is a crappy service, she will call her nephew, a.k.a. "Mr. Bandwidth Hog", and ask him who the best ISP to use is. He will reccomend the ISP which treats him best, and she will pass that reccomendation on to her entire bridge club.
I watched with interest when my elderly step-father got into computers. He quickly became obsessed, and joined up a seniors computer club, most of whom seemed equally obsessed.
I would have to say though that these people, and probably the ladies in the bridge club, are absolutely the worst kinds of customer an ISP could ever have - a lot worse than someone running a P2P network. They contact the service line A LOT. Ever wondered why you wait for ages to get throug? Its because a small minority of users is ringing the help desk for half an hour every week.
I tried to forestall your comments by noting that the system doesn't work well for these people right now anyway.
I don't know if you are personally a "small inventor", and if you have personally created a business on the basis of a patent but I think you might just find that the rosy-tinted view you have of the patent system expired a long time ago.
The only thing that will work is a bounty, collected by anyone who manages to prove prior art or otherwise invalidate the patent.
The money for the bounty should be put up by the patentee, about $10K should do it, refundable if the patent still stands two years later. And before anyone moans about how this would prevent Joe Average from getting started, you need to:
question how exactly he can do that at the moment with the cruddy patent system in place, and;
consider that anyone who can't spend $10K on protecting their IP is probably best served not be getting a patent, but instead by releasing their idea into the public domain so it can serve as prior art, thus preventing anyone else from patenting it - allowing them to compete on excellence of execution, if not on IP lockout.
Mounting a patent challenge should cost $1K, non-refundable, to cover USPTO's costs (well, almost !).
Quite possible this would start a thriving industry, perhaps manned by third world netizens with time on their hands and access to the internet, who would be far more effective than the jackass bureaucrats at USPTO in performing genuine peer review on patents. That would be a GOOD THING.
What's even worse is that in July I went to the USA and signed a heads-of-agreement with a US company who were going to commence manufacture of my X-Jet engine for use in UAVs and RPVs. This deal alone was worth a huge amount of money to the NZ taxman and would have also created new jobs and export earnings for this country.
I'm a kiwi who perhaps has a different take on this than you since I a) pay taxes in NZ, and b) have been involved in deals when my company has several times had "heads of agreement" signed up with US firms, and they have later turned out to be worth exactly nothing. Thats not to say they behaved in bad faith, just the a heads of agreement is typically a "good intentions" kind of thing, often signed up before any hard thought has gone into actual commercial terms or even where the money will come from. In fact it is common for struggling firms to ask a poetntial custoemr for a heads of agreement (" come on, just give us this, it doesn't mean anything, you can always back out if you want to") just so they have something to take back to the boss/sales mgr/investors/bank manager.
So if your point is that IRD are losing out on future earnings, then my question is: just how solid was that agreement? Would you be prepared to publish the text of it here on/.? Was it so solid that it really was money in the bank for the NZ government? And if so, why didn't you sell it to someone rather than be bankrupted?
So I'm in India right now attempting to hire programmers and a lead to take over maintenance of my completely over engineered code (I inherited it). It is bizarre to me how many of the applicants can't understand or consistently apply basics of maintainability...
[snip]
If India has a very competitive software engineering environment, I sure haven't seen it yet. I HAVE seen that the top universities, such as IIT Mumbai, DO produce world-class engineers, but other schools are not up to speed.
As a matter of interest, why don't you just hire people from the top schools then? Are you attempting an even cheaper form of outsourcing? Using not just programmers in a cheaper (lower-waged) country, but second-class programmers in the cheaper country?
Ha ha, for once I decided to RTFA and found this gem - pleased I am to bring this to the attention of the slashdot hordes, and I await their vituperuos denunciations of Mr. Johnson with unbridled enthusiasm.
MR. JOHNSON Out in the Bay Area there are plenty of folks who would love to create a little bit of protectionism around their I.T. jobs, but we are far better off letting a lot of those jobs go. Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely though this is the minority case and is fairly unique to reference books, which have already had their market pretty much hammered by the web anyway. I'd say that many many people would just keep googling until they found the recipe they wanted and would never be in the market for a recipe book themselves anyway.
As a self-appointed expert in these areas I would imagine that recipe book purchases are in fact a lifestyle purchase - people buy them because they a) look great on their kitchen shelves, b) have a picture of some sleek cooking goddess like Nigella who you might like to give it to over the sink, etc. etc. Can't imagine many people rush out and buy them in order to get a recipe for making salmon souffle.
On the other hand I read a lot of history and this would positively make me buy more books - triggered by a relevant excert I saw on the web. No way would I read a big history book on a computer. I don't buy encyclopedias, recipe books or dictionaries anyway.
My company, for example, sells a fairly complex piece of HR software. It has a hideously large (structured!) database that captures just about everything.
Reporting, for us, is a big, big deal. Customers are constantly demanding more insight into their broken business processes.
The problem we have in satisfying this (apart from the fact that all customers are different) is the sequential nature of developing useful reports. You build one, only to find that it identifies another, more interesting, area to report on, so you cycle around again. Each cycle takes quite a while, by the time you've written SQL and then loaded the resulting report data into the pox-ridden beast that is Excel (I guess there are other tools we could use to speed things up, but I think the SQL seems to have to be hand-written).
If this tool can produce "interesting" visualisations, without the need to think too much, that would be very useful.
Analogy-wise, I am walking around in a forest of data. I know there is interesting stuff to be seen, but I don't want to have to dig it out, I want it to stand out in the same way my eye is alerted at the pattern of a beautiful butterfly sitting on a tree - even if I though I was looking for leaf patterns.
If the tool handled this kind of thing then yes, $1000 per seat is easily in the ballpark, or more.
The classic Word vs. OpenOffice faceoff. Happens in our office every few months (substitute other MS vs. open source productivity tools here if you like):
PHB: Hey Jake, can you get me that stuff I need for the proposal. The customer wants it in MS Word form this time - they had a little trouble reading your last piece. I need it this afternoon, big rush.
OSZ (Open Source Zealot): Yeah, sure, I'll do it in OpenOffice and flash it straight to you.
PHB: Look, I've got nothing against open source, I just don't use OpenOffice. I tried it ages ago, and then again a few months ago. No matter what they say, there's always some little incompatibility that ends up costing you hours.
OSZ: No, that was the older versions. The new OpenOffice rocks, its absolutely compatible with Word.
PHB: I don't care, I just don't trust it. Just use Word to write the document, OK?
OSZ: [sullenly] If you say so.
[.. hours pass..]
OSZ: I've got that document you wanted. But I..ahhh.. couldn't use Word, I used OpenOffice. I can't run Word on my machine any more. But look, I can absolutely, 100% guarantee that OpenOffice is 100% compatible with Word, it'll work fine!!!
PHB: [sullenly] Oh shit. OK. Just frigging mail it to me then.
[.. more hours pass..]
PHB: [spitting fire] F*&$! That fricking OpenOffice crap has polluted my Word document! All the tables have got some kind of hidden formatting in them that makes them 6 inches high and I can't edit them. I need to get this to the customer IN SIXTEEN FUCKING MINUTES!! GET THAT FRICKING OPENOFFICE OUT OF THE FRICKING OFFICE YOU FRICKING ASSHOLE!!!!!!
OSZ: I don't know what happened there. That was all fixed up I thought. But look, hey, the next version really does give you absolutely 100% compatibility!!
This academic argument gets trotted out over and over again, and its just as unconvincing every time.
Back here in the real world, where MS holds sway, the way things go is that if you write your code to run on an MS platform, then every single time someone runs it, MS's cash register gives out a big KA-CHIIING !!!!
But if you write it to run on Java, then that does not have to happen. It may do, but people have options.
So respectfully, Java is way, way more free than .Net.
Sinking to everyone else's level may not be the best, or even a practical option.
A seldom-mentioned way to defeat patents is just to publish your work and place it in the public domain. This creates the prior art which can be used to strike down patents in the future.
The main problem is, of course, that most peoiple don't want to publish their work, they want to keep it locked up and secret. Thus this avenue is not open to most commercial software firms. They are forced into the patents arms race.
Open source is exempt from this problem. The best way to defeat patents is for there to be a published open source version of the "invention" (and I use the word with wry amusement) which pre-dates any patents. There is no need to go to the hassle and expense of actually procuring a patent.
"People who receive this treatment are generally whining or complaining. That's a way to shrug them off, because developers have no time to waste with such people. ".
In a nutshell, you gave an example of the very point the author was making. When developers don't care about a user's complaints, then they are no longer aiming at building something of usefulness to others but instead are scratching their own itch. I know it burns when people complain about your creations. Why, they're as good as challening you as a person aren't they! Get over it pal. I'm sure you're a magnificently gifted contributor to your own itch, but are you creating things for other people? A resounding NO based on your response.
And possibly your knowledge of HTML needs an update itself?
<AHREF="Remember to always put a space after the A">
I don't know whats funnier. That the faintest sign that you are a female triggers a sexual frenzy in some sad geekboy who's only contact with such exotic creatures is lusting after the girl in the drive-thru Macs where he eats, or that you are almost certainly not a girl anyway.
True, but with an important twist - the upside is unlimited if your skanky lawsuits are successful, but if you lose, the downside is limited to your investment - you simply fold up the company.
That is both the beauty, and the curse, of the capitalist system and of corporations.
No disrespect but you talk like an employee, not someone who cares. Imagine your liveliehood depends on keeping your company - which sends out hundreds of thousands of valid, asked for emails per day - running so you can feed your brood and keep a roof over. Thats how I'm thinking while reading these posts. I'm guessing if you really cared you would have a more constructive comment to make.
Ha ha, very amusing, swapping electronic money for electronic voting.
And you make a good point, but the differences are:
If so, this raises a couple of issues:
And there is even an Open Source aspect to this new form of protection: It can be used as a new form of attribution. Who wrote what part of that Open Source program? Copyright notices and comments can be removed, but the PSCP code renaming signature can't be.
Open source code which can only submitted while obfuscated (thus preserving its signature) is not open source any more, so I don't buy this as a benefit of the technology.
I think the main dangers to people protecting their source code in the medium term will remain what they are now: Incompetence and conspiracy from within (witness the win2k code leakage)
Once upon a time, not so long ago (well, 15 years or so ago, when I was last an IBM-er), IBM were considered the devil incarnate by the rest of the industry. Certainly not as ruthless as Microsoft, but by no means an altruistic benefactor of society.
IBM was famous for FUD, in fact the term may well have been first put forward about them. The mere threat of new products and technologies from IBM could chill the market.
The last real incident of this that I remember was when IBM introduced the PS2. It came with the revolutionary new MCA bus. The PC add-on board makers screamed that IBM was going to decimate them, and may struggled to produce boards using the new bus. In fact, those that stuck with ISA (?) were the smart ones as the market has by this time overtaken IBM even though they didn't yet realise it.
I don't think of IBM as a "non-hostile" - just as one with very smart PR and an understanding that they will never again be a force in the PC operating system market, so their best tactic, since they can't have it, is to make sure no-one else (Microsoft) has it either. Kind of like pissing in the well if you can't drink from it.
Those acts were horrific but they were carried out with the intent of shortening the war by breaking the morale of those civilians and others in other German towns and cities who heard about them.
Many hundreds of thousands of civilians were indeed killed by those raids, but during the day those same "innocent civilians" were out making bombs, planes and tanks in Germany's armament factories. Pretty much all males in Germany from age 14 upwards (though much less so females), including millions of slave labourers impotred from the occupied countries, spent their entire days directly supporting Germany's war effort. Bombing them was a valid action of war that resulted in a lower overall loss of life. And no matter how you cut it, given that the Germans started the whole thing off, it was better to kill them than be killed by them.
IBM and Novell want to see this SCO bullshit hit the courts as soon as possible. What they don't want is this albatross hanging around the necks of their linux business. Up until now, SCO could just sit there and let the FUD fester - now IBM and Novell have neutralised the FUD.
The key to understanding all of these corporate moves is always to put yourself in the shoes of the person who has to answer the questions from the god-like beings in the boardroom. YOu can tell them until you're blue in the face that SCO's antics are bullshit - all they think about is the risk of THEM being sued because someone talked them into using that crazy commie software.
Now you can say to them "Don't worry, IBM will lend us their lawyers if it does come to a fight".
The turd that is SCO has been dislodged and is starting its long slow slide down the crapper.
Strangely, this really will pass once you reach more mature years. Perhaps mid-30s, thats when it came for me. Up until then I too was convinced that accelerating my way out of situations was a vital - and frequently used - defensive driving strategy. Strangely enough, after having kids and suddenly having to really think about safety for others in my car, not just me, I adopted a whole new (and much slower) way of driving. Since then, I have never - not once - had to speed up to get out of a dangerous situation. Ad mittedly I don't spend much time driving through neighbourhoods of rampaging out-of-control rednecks as you seem to (WHY ??).
I accept that speeding up to exit a bad situation is a valid option that I might use again one day. But personally, I'd be prepared to let the cops have their tractor beam to stop the shithead who is screaming at 100mph through the street where I live and where kids play, if the downside was that theoretically they might turn it on me one day (I agree with you though that I don't want any AI in my car making that decision).
Given that it is possible to write such applications using standard HTML (though no-one would claim it is easy), why on earth would anyone produce this (very much needed) solution in a way that guarantees it will only ever be of academic interest.
We had to build something exactly like this ourselves. It would have cost over $500K in internal costs. It is great, and helps us build our app, but it is pure enabling technology and I would love to be able to use a well-supported framework instead.
But anything that doesn't support IE is dead in the water. Microsoft will do everything in their power to make sure it does not fly on IE.
a) also being wiling to accept other people's hardware - as someone else said, its often easier to give machines (even modern ones) than money; and/or
b) explaining why you need $20K worth of kit. I agree with others that this is a LOT of hardware.
We run some very critical Oracle/Java/Apache systems for our customers and it all happens on Dell PowerEdge servers. The last (and most expensive) machine we bought was about $3K, with dual CPUs, RAID storage, I think 4Gb of memory. To me, you are asking for the money to buy 7 of these.
Oh yeah, and $20K sounds suspiciously like a round number pulled from the air :)
Yep, this is basically what Jobs said in an interview - that the only thing the record companies CAN do well is identify and nurture talent (if shafting them up the ass can be considered nurturing I guess).
That does sound too simple though, and I think Jobs is being economical with the truth. There are doubtless plenty of individuals around who can identify talent - e.g., all those individuals currently employed by the record companies.
What he's really saying is that the record companies can both identify talent, and also, because of their market clout, they can legitimise, brainwash kids with it, turn it into the mainstream.
Pretty soon Apple will have that market clout, even if right now they don't have the talent spotters.
So, yeah, I agree with the grandparent post, some time in the not too distant future, Apple will start working directly with the artists themselves and cutting out the middlemen.
Perhaps the end game is that the record companies become "hollowed out" and their talent scouts, lawyers, publicists etc. become hired guns for the new distributors - like Apple. Once that happens, expect to find your neighbourhood CD shop has morphed into a cafe/listening joint with CD burners in the corners.
I watched with interest when my elderly step-father got into computers. He quickly became obsessed, and joined up a seniors computer club, most of whom seemed equally obsessed.
I would have to say though that these people, and probably the ladies in the bridge club, are absolutely the worst kinds of customer an ISP could ever have - a lot worse than someone running a P2P network. They contact the service line A LOT. Ever wondered why you wait for ages to get throug? Its because a small minority of users is ringing the help desk for half an hour every week.
I don't know if you are personally a "small inventor", and if you have personally created a business on the basis of a patent but I think you might just find that the rosy-tinted view you have of the patent system expired a long time ago.
The only thing that will work is a bounty, collected by anyone who manages to prove prior art or otherwise invalidate the patent.
The money for the bounty should be put up by the patentee, about $10K should do it, refundable if the patent still stands two years later. And before anyone moans about how this would prevent Joe Average from getting started, you need to:
Mounting a patent challenge should cost $1K, non-refundable, to cover USPTO's costs (well, almost !).
Quite possible this would start a thriving industry, perhaps manned by third world netizens with time on their hands and access to the internet, who would be far more effective than the jackass bureaucrats at USPTO in performing genuine peer review on patents. That would be a GOOD THING.
I'm a kiwi who perhaps has a different take on this than you since I a) pay taxes in NZ, and b) have been involved in deals when my company has several times had "heads of agreement" signed up with US firms, and they have later turned out to be worth exactly nothing. Thats not to say they behaved in bad faith, just the a heads of agreement is typically a "good intentions" kind of thing, often signed up before any hard thought has gone into actual commercial terms or even where the money will come from. In fact it is common for struggling firms to ask a poetntial custoemr for a heads of agreement (" come on, just give us this, it doesn't mean anything, you can always back out if you want to") just so they have something to take back to the boss/sales mgr/investors/bank manager.
So if your point is that IRD are losing out on future earnings, then my question is: just how solid was that agreement? Would you be prepared to publish the text of it here on /.? Was it so solid that it really was money in the bank for the NZ government? And if so, why didn't you sell it to someone rather than be bankrupted?
[snip]
If India has a very competitive software engineering environment, I sure haven't seen it yet. I HAVE seen that the top universities, such as IIT Mumbai, DO produce world-class engineers, but other schools are not up to speed.
As a matter of interest, why don't you just hire people from the top schools then? Are you attempting an even cheaper form of outsourcing? Using not just programmers in a cheaper (lower-waged) country, but second-class programmers in the cheaper country?
MR. JOHNSON Out in the Bay Area there are plenty of folks who would love to create a little bit of protectionism around their I.T. jobs, but we are far better off letting a lot of those jobs go. Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.