It's not their decision to make, it's ours. I think the next time they whine about the conditions of their "parole"(what I call their inheriting a monopoly and behaving like it still exists) I think we need to tell them they're just a managing company, and can be replaced at our whim. Let's see bell paying the network access fee, and see if they like it. They want to charge for use of something WE own, they shouldn't be allowed to profit from that.
The stuff they don't know about, inside their legal context I agree.
On the other hand, the BSA certainly is not a standard of measure by any means, more like an interested party, interested in making liability as widespread as possible.
Oddly enough, you're asking them about software they don't know about... Well if they don't know about it, how do you expect them to answer?
Or do you just expect them to check now, and give you an answer later? As for reflecting on them... Employee behaviour at one sibling company doesn't reflect on the other sibling company, it reflect on the parent, for not disciplining it's "child" companies. This is not just a division, they are seperate companies, with only some owners in common.
Your example might provide a reason for the results of the study... Women might not want their signs of interest understood as much as they say they do.
I think you've nailed one of the problems right on the head.
A lot of parallel processing just won't work, because for conceptual reasons, we follow the surgeon's "one hand in the chest area at a time" rule. You can parallellize all you want, but all you're going to do, is make a faster desktop(ok that's useful, but not where the development money goes), and the servers are going to lag behind, insert an example of a pointy-haired database administrator talking to another: "Yeah I have 16 drive controllers on this beast, to take advantage of parallellism even on IO" "But... you only got one database, and one table in that database" "So? I got to have sequential, unique transaction numbers, all across the board, with synchronized transations... I need just one table."
On top of that, it would be quite surprising that the contact between the reseller and the wholesaler NOT explicitely say such a thing is unacceptable. Especially considering that they are in competition with each other, by narrowing down the flow, that's the next thing to unfair competition.
What seems to have happened from my point of view, is that the wholesaler used to put the resellers before its own retail clients before, and now put everyone at the same level. I expect the wholesaler to be called before the CRTC.
Nothing in the word makes sure you HAVE to not be stupid, even if you are Microsoft. That's why there is a proverb "make something idiot-proof, and the universe builds a better idiot". Microsoft also has such clout that it's profited from backstabbing friends for years, with little or no prosecution(hard for a bankrupt company to hurt the 800lbs gorilla). Microsoft would stop being Microsoft if it stopped being adversarial and control-freakish on consumers. The company was started riding the coattails of the ibm pc "monopoly"(they were the only supplier at one point), and will most likely end trying to control what cannot be controlled, it's so transparent in their actions, makes me wonder if it isn't their corporate mission: "To overprice, undersell until we take control over the market and noone has any choice but to make us profit or else we nuke their data."
There's also been that litigation concern(they have been found guilty of illegal monopoly, and the surveillance is ongoing). I imagine it looks better for microsoft to support Office for the Mac, and IE5 for Unix(proprietary Unixen) than not to. As for switching... people think it does, but the office format so convoluted, and so version dependant, it's usually wishful thinking.
Why do we have to confuse a technically-charged "business" decision with politics anyways? I swear I wish we could keep those conservative vs liberal arguments for the goverment's spending.
Oh wait you think because it's public money, it becomes a governmental issue? Then why isn't the CIO of a university elected?
Sheesh it's gvmt or it's not, but it can't be halfway.
Vista's multimedia channels are DRM encumbered. This was thought to be a good thing(pro-RIAA) except it slows down all mp3/aac you can play on the system, even in games...
Now even microsoft encourages game developers to use the system libraries, for playing those standard formats(like they did on XP). Except now they make some games all but unplayable.
I'd say that's an example of vista sucks, and it's pretty closely tied to DirectSound, not DirectX.
The summary talks about a common misconception, and manages to create another.
Authentication is when you identify(as in Identity) yourself, when you want to(say, to enter your home), or to get that 5% rebate at that place you like to eat at.
Anonymity is when someone else wants you to identify yourself, and you refuse.
Imputability is when someone's done something and 1) you want to Identify them properly, and 2) do something about some of the people you identify(presumably because something they did was wrong)
Anonymity is something private citizens like, in part because they don't much like imputability. That is when they do something, and it's not tied to their Identity.
Forcing someone to authenticate themselves is something the police, for one, likes, because 1) It prevents them from being blamed for mis-identifying someone 2) If they catch you doing something, and impute it once you authenticated yourself, they're fairly sure they impute it in such a way, it will follow you for a long long time(if they can impute your "identity" more on that later.
However, it has its drawbacks 1) If you authenticate yourself with falsified credentials, you get someone else blamed for your acts 2) It doesn't deal with the fact that you may be unable(damaged or lost credentials)/unwilling to identify yourself/automated systems may mis-indentify you
It doesn't solve the question of "Identity" itself either. Like when the no-fly list(falling under imputability) lists names(which can be the same for two people), leading to the same result as a falsified authentication.
Just a quick summary:
Identity: Who you are Authentication: Proving who you are Anonymity: Not having to say who you are Imputability: Blaming who you are
The four are interlinked, but often confused, as in the article.
People interested in laws like RealID need to pay a lot more attention to distinctions between all four. Until the authentication part can be more more foolproof, the imputability is scary(you can be blamed for stuff you haven't done), the anonymity, well it's scary to those who'd rather deal with people they can identify(and therefore impute, think contracts to keep it in the white hat sphere). And the Identity, well that's the real problem. If you have a single, centralized database, any single mistaken Identity becomes life-altering, if not actually life-threatening(correcting someone's id with falsified credentials in order to make their lives a living hell? Yes, it can do that).
So in other words, as long as open source(which includes, and requires, a cleaner "process" than Microsoft) wants to fight Microsoft on OSS's own turf(clean process) they lose(not corporate), on Microsoft's own turf(shady legitimacy), they lose, on neutral ground(which I haven't seen yet, as everyone seems to have some form of bias(or can seem to, if you're arguing against them), they also lose.
The opposition from OSS to Microsoft usually stems from people who wanted to be Microsoft friends, and who saw how Microsoft treats its friends/partners. (Long list, from Stacker to kerberos implementations gone wrong, etc...) If you are in OSS, you can see that Microsoft has a history of cheating, you can (with some justification) expect them to try to cheat you, but the business guys expect you to ignore this, or else, YOU are against the corporate ethos? Diplomacy is all well and fine, but it's usually best employed between parties whose good faith is equal.
Let's just agree corporate America isn't ready for open source, I for one am ready for the next debate. Microsoft will not clean up its act without a BIG stick on the nose. So far, it's only got a rolled up newspaper, and only when it got caught red-handed. They have not shown "good faith", they have done damage control. They've never formally renounced "embrace/extend/extinguish" as a modus operandi. This is the people we have to be diplomatic with... Can we just agree we don't want to play, and go home? There's been a very long, bloody history of bad faith(mostly on their part, but yes there have been zealots on the other camp too, however, there's only been casualties on one side), too big to ignore unless something changes(they could formally drop OOXML, and embrace ODF(not in a year, not after the next shareholders meeting, but now!) something LOUD, something that shows they believe in openness(not necessarily open source) that they are willing to face the anger of their shareholders over it. (I've kept fantasizing they'd opensource office instead, but that won't happen that's just a fantasy).
If Microsoft continues with software as a service, they will either become an unstoppable juggernaut, or make themselves completely irrelevant. They don't need the opensource crowd, so what diplomacy we do is just allowing them to dodge bigger and bigger fines from regulatory body, not enticing, encouraging, or helping them believe in openness. And right now, they are making money in giving just the apparence of openness, and corporate America does not care, can not care, will not care, but will bemoan its fate when a stronger Microsoft has it again by the balls and ask us, "where were you, we knew you hated them, why didn't you warn us, you're it guys, etc...". And we'll just tell them, we've been telling you, you just told us we were fanatics... Well sometimes, even fanatics have real opponents, people who believe just as fanatically(if only at the top) in exactly the opposite idea.
I for one think openness means Microsoft cannot bully the market, since I've not seen them win market share on product merit in quite some time, I think they need to bully the market in order to enhance their shareholder value. More openness would be against increasing their market capitalisatiion, and therefore a bad thing, for them. It's mutually exclusive, we can build a market where everyone can play, or Microsoft can build a market where they give permission to play, it's not exactly a place for compromise...
Can't the state just sue them for misrepresenting their software as "suitable"?
Something tells me that not just accepting, but passing an independant audit should be a requirement for just bidding on the contract, let alone winning it.
But the supplier is saying an independant audit(due diligence on the part of the elected officials, IMHO) is against the terms of the contract? WTF?
While reducing wasted memory is a good thing(and memory leaks are worse). Opera's or Firefox's memory usage can include caching resources... Opera's been talked to as the "fastest" browser around, not the lightest... There's a difference, and I'm surprised so few people on Slashdot caught it.
Having less memory leaks makes you faster, but being faster can happen using more memory.
I think you managed to dance around the problem's very core. The problem of overpopulation is underpinned by our resources being taxed, we are unlikely to be able to motivate everyone to spend resources they want to have to live, to allow someone else to live somewhere else, especially if it's resource intensive. Now terraforming another globe of rock nearby is not going to be cheap, nor is finding one further away that needs less 'forming. I think we're going to have to learn to live with each other and within our energy/resource means instead, just from a cost/benefits analysis standpoint.
I think the US should work on getting rid of the bomb, if they think the weapons are so destabilising, I don't see the current US regime as particulaly stability-inducing either. Letting just the biggest, most dangerous fish have the bigger weapons might be good for their capacity to beat the little fish into submission, but does not mean the fish as a whole are necessarily better off, quite the opposite. If anything, how destabilising and dangerous the weapons are is that even if you hit the largest countries in the world, you can't guarantee you'll control the fallout enough to keep it from hitting other countries. Otherwise, it would be a great weapon to get some of those big bullies off your back.
Can we at least prevail on the lawmakers to enforce that NO payment is made on anyone but the songwriters until the songwriters are paid, and in that order?
Assuming you're not just trolling, it's simply that the laws that have been passed show particular cluelessness about technology(which in Slashdot terms, technology issues are not decided from a technology standpoint, more or less). All the other non-technology factors always seem to win out against pure technology. Since most nerds are pro-technology, this offends us, and lots of the political coverage of the campaign on slashdot seems to be about which candidate can reverse that trend. Moreover, some pretty hot topics in technology are ethics-infected(think MPAA/RIAA/Diebold/etc..) and you get another hot button for slashdot. It's not that he's special per se, it's that he's potentially closer to being one of us, and representing us, and agreeing with us, than all the others.
How closely this matches reality, vs how it matches the slashdot mental referent, well for that, YMMV.
I remember windows 5 being NT(code name cairo, so what became 2000, but announced in 1997), 95 was windows 4(both were worked on at almost the same time, but had different code lineage) No idea which one was 6, but vista could make it, if you include all the features they took out. It's funny that vista is the first version of windows that included features NOT on the 1997 list, so it could be the 6.0/
P.S. the actual version numbers were included in release documents from microsoft at one point, we shouldn't need to assume.
They get thrown out in sewage, and nobody thought of actually filtering those biologically active molecules before putting them in an aqueduct. It just means some engineers need to get cracking for a proper filter, or maybe just fine tuning an existing one.
We know they had keyboards as backups for their voice interfaces in ST:TNG, besides, he would be the one to fix "The Computer" when its voice interface would be down, so he would be familiar with "a keyboard" maybe not a qwerty one.
Most likely, Apple just doesn't want to get stuck supporting it. I doubt they have anything against java per se(well except it can run arbitrary apps...) Oh wait... And Sun is notorious for not letting others have control of the standard...
Hmm guess they will have to supply it themselves... Now the big question becomes, will apple really try to block them? It could be a big stinker either way.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because one item sold expensively doesn't mean the recession is impossible anyways.
It's not their decision to make, it's ours. I think the next time they whine about the conditions of their "parole"(what I call their inheriting a monopoly and behaving like it still exists) I think we need to tell them they're just a managing company, and can be replaced at our whim. Let's see bell paying the network access fee, and see if they like it. They want to charge for use of something WE own, they shouldn't be allowed to profit from that.
The stuff they don't know about, inside their legal context I agree.
On the other hand, the BSA certainly is not a standard of measure by any means, more like an interested party, interested in making liability as widespread as possible.
Oddly enough, you're asking them about software they don't know about...
Well if they don't know about it, how do you expect them to answer?
Or do you just expect them to check now, and give you an answer later?
As for reflecting on them... Employee behaviour at one sibling company doesn't reflect on the other sibling company, it reflect on the parent, for not disciplining it's "child" companies. This is not just a division, they are seperate companies, with only some owners in common.
Your example might provide a reason for the results of the study... Women might not want their signs of interest understood as much as they say they do.
I think you've nailed one of the problems right on the head.
A lot of parallel processing just won't work, because for conceptual reasons, we follow the surgeon's "one hand in the chest area at a time" rule. You can parallellize all you want, but all you're going to do, is make a faster desktop(ok that's useful, but not where the development money goes), and the servers are going to lag behind, insert an example of a pointy-haired database administrator talking to another: "Yeah I have 16 drive controllers on this beast, to take advantage of parallellism even on IO" "But... you only got one database, and one table in that database"
"So? I got to have sequential, unique transaction numbers, all across the board, with synchronized transations... I need just one table."
Wasteful hardware spendings galore...
On top of that, it would be quite surprising that the contact between the reseller and the wholesaler NOT explicitely say such a thing is unacceptable. Especially considering that they are in competition with each other, by narrowing down the flow, that's the next thing to unfair competition.
What seems to have happened from my point of view, is that the wholesaler used to put the resellers before its own retail clients before, and now put everyone at the same level. I expect the wholesaler to be called before the CRTC.
Nothing in the word makes sure you HAVE to not be stupid, even if you are Microsoft. That's why there is a proverb "make something idiot-proof, and the universe builds a better idiot". Microsoft also has such clout that it's profited from backstabbing friends for years, with little or no prosecution(hard for a bankrupt company to hurt the 800lbs gorilla). Microsoft would stop being Microsoft if it stopped being adversarial and control-freakish on consumers. The company was started riding the coattails of the ibm pc "monopoly"(they were the only supplier at one point), and will most likely end trying to control what cannot be controlled, it's so transparent in their actions, makes me wonder if it isn't their corporate mission: "To overprice, undersell until we take control over the market and noone has any choice but to make us profit or else we nuke their data."
There's also been that litigation concern(they have been found guilty of illegal monopoly, and the surveillance is ongoing). I imagine it looks better for microsoft to support Office for the Mac, and IE5 for Unix(proprietary Unixen) than not to. As for switching... people think it does, but the office format so convoluted, and so version dependant, it's usually wishful thinking.
So the behaviour mandated by the standard is insecure?
And nobody thought to update the standard?
Why do we have to confuse a technically-charged "business" decision with politics anyways?
I swear I wish we could keep those conservative vs liberal arguments for the goverment's spending.
Oh wait you think because it's public money, it becomes a governmental issue? Then why isn't the CIO of a university elected?
Sheesh it's gvmt or it's not, but it can't be halfway.
People confuse the two, mostly because you can't have democracy without freedom. So they wrongly think as long as they are democratic, they are safe.
Vista's multimedia channels are DRM encumbered. This was thought to be a good thing(pro-RIAA) except it slows down all mp3/aac you can play on the system, even in games...
Now even microsoft encourages game developers to use the system libraries, for playing those standard formats(like they did on XP). Except now they make some games all but unplayable.
I'd say that's an example of vista sucks, and it's pretty closely tied to DirectSound, not DirectX.
The summary talks about a common misconception, and manages to create another.
Authentication is when you identify(as in Identity) yourself, when you want to(say, to enter your home), or to get that 5% rebate at that place you like to eat at.
Anonymity is when someone else wants you to identify yourself, and you refuse.
Imputability is when someone's done something and 1) you want to Identify them properly, and 2) do something about some of the people you identify(presumably because something they did was wrong)
Anonymity is something private citizens like, in part because they don't much like imputability. That is when they do something, and it's not tied to their Identity.
Forcing someone to authenticate themselves is something the police, for one, likes, because
1) It prevents them from being blamed for mis-identifying someone
2) If they catch you doing something, and impute it once you authenticated yourself, they're fairly sure they impute it in such a way, it will follow you for a long long time(if they can impute your "identity" more on that later.
However, it has its drawbacks
1) If you authenticate yourself with falsified credentials, you get someone else blamed for your acts
2) It doesn't deal with the fact that you may be unable(damaged or lost credentials)/unwilling to identify yourself/automated systems may mis-indentify you
It doesn't solve the question of "Identity" itself either. Like when the no-fly list(falling under imputability) lists names(which can be the same for two people), leading to the same result as a falsified authentication.
Just a quick summary:
Identity: Who you are
Authentication: Proving who you are
Anonymity: Not having to say who you are
Imputability: Blaming who you are
The four are interlinked, but often confused, as in the article.
People interested in laws like RealID need to pay a lot more attention to distinctions between all four. Until the authentication part can be more more foolproof, the imputability is scary(you can be blamed for stuff you haven't done), the anonymity, well it's scary to those who'd rather deal with people they can identify(and therefore impute, think contracts to keep it in the white hat sphere). And the Identity, well that's the real problem. If you have a single, centralized database, any single mistaken Identity becomes life-altering, if not actually life-threatening(correcting someone's id with falsified credentials in order to make their lives a living hell? Yes, it can do that).
Does that bother you a little? I know it does me.
So in other words, as long as open source(which includes, and requires, a cleaner "process" than Microsoft) wants to fight Microsoft on OSS's own turf(clean process) they lose(not corporate), on Microsoft's own turf(shady legitimacy), they lose, on neutral ground(which I haven't seen yet, as everyone seems to have some form of bias(or can seem to, if you're arguing against them), they also lose.
The opposition from OSS to Microsoft usually stems from people who wanted to be Microsoft friends, and who saw how Microsoft treats its friends/partners. (Long list, from Stacker to kerberos implementations gone wrong, etc...) If you are in OSS, you can see that Microsoft has a history of cheating, you can (with some justification) expect them to try to cheat you, but the business guys expect you to ignore this, or else, YOU are against the corporate ethos? Diplomacy is all well and fine, but it's usually best employed between parties whose good faith is equal.
Let's just agree corporate America isn't ready for open source, I for one am ready for the next debate. Microsoft will not clean up its act without a BIG stick on the nose. So far, it's only got a rolled up newspaper, and only when it got caught red-handed. They have not shown "good faith", they have done damage control. They've never formally renounced "embrace/extend/extinguish" as a modus operandi. This is the people we have to be diplomatic with... Can we just agree we don't want to play, and go home? There's been a very long, bloody history of bad faith(mostly on their part, but yes there have been zealots on the other camp too, however, there's only been casualties on one side), too big to ignore unless something changes(they could formally drop OOXML, and embrace ODF(not in a year, not after the next shareholders meeting, but now!) something LOUD, something that shows they believe in openness(not necessarily open source) that they are willing to face the anger of their shareholders over it. (I've kept fantasizing they'd opensource office instead, but that won't happen that's just a fantasy).
If Microsoft continues with software as a service, they will either become an unstoppable juggernaut, or make themselves completely irrelevant. They don't need the opensource crowd, so what diplomacy we do is just allowing them to dodge bigger and bigger fines from regulatory body, not enticing, encouraging, or helping them believe in openness. And right now, they are making money in giving just the apparence of openness, and corporate America does not care, can not care, will not care, but will bemoan its fate when a stronger Microsoft has it again by the balls and ask us, "where were you, we knew you hated them, why didn't you warn us, you're it guys, etc...". And we'll just tell them, we've been telling you, you just told us we were fanatics... Well sometimes, even fanatics have real opponents, people who believe just as fanatically(if only at the top) in exactly the opposite idea.
I for one think openness means Microsoft cannot bully the market, since I've not seen them win market share on product merit in quite some time, I think they need to bully the market in order to enhance their shareholder value. More openness would be against increasing their market capitalisatiion, and therefore a bad thing, for them. It's mutually exclusive, we can build a market where everyone can play, or Microsoft can build a market where they give permission to play, it's not exactly a place for compromise...
Can't the state just sue them for misrepresenting their software as "suitable"?
Something tells me that not just accepting, but passing an independant audit should be a requirement for just bidding on the contract, let alone winning it.
But the supplier is saying an independant audit(due diligence on the part of the elected officials, IMHO) is against the terms of the contract? WTF?
While reducing wasted memory is a good thing(and memory leaks are worse). Opera's or Firefox's memory usage can include caching resources... Opera's been talked to as the "fastest" browser around, not the lightest... There's a difference, and I'm surprised so few people on Slashdot caught it.
Having less memory leaks makes you faster, but being faster can happen using more memory.
I think you managed to dance around the problem's very core. The problem of overpopulation is underpinned by our resources being taxed, we are unlikely to be able to motivate everyone to spend resources they want to have to live, to allow someone else to live somewhere else, especially if it's resource intensive. Now terraforming another globe of rock nearby is not going to be cheap, nor is finding one further away that needs less 'forming. I think we're going to have to learn to live with each other and within our energy/resource means instead, just from a cost/benefits analysis standpoint.
I think the US should work on getting rid of the bomb, if they think the weapons are so destabilising, I don't see the current US regime as particulaly stability-inducing either. Letting just the biggest, most dangerous fish have the bigger weapons might be good for their capacity to beat the little fish into submission, but does not mean the fish as a whole are necessarily better off, quite the opposite. If anything, how destabilising and dangerous the weapons are is that even if you hit the largest countries in the world, you can't guarantee you'll control the fallout enough to keep it from hitting other countries. Otherwise, it would be a great weapon to get some of those big bullies off your back.
Can we at least prevail on the lawmakers to enforce that NO payment is made on anyone but the songwriters until the songwriters are paid, and in that order?
Assuming you're not just trolling, it's simply that the laws that have been passed show particular cluelessness about technology(which in Slashdot terms, technology issues are not decided from a technology standpoint, more or less). All the other non-technology factors always seem to win out against pure technology. Since most nerds are pro-technology, this offends us, and lots of the political coverage of the campaign on slashdot seems to be about which candidate can reverse that trend. Moreover, some pretty hot topics in technology are ethics-infected(think MPAA/RIAA/Diebold/etc..) and you get another hot button for slashdot. It's not that he's special per se, it's that he's potentially closer to being one of us, and representing us, and agreeing with us, than all the others.
How closely this matches reality, vs how it matches the slashdot mental referent, well for that, YMMV.
He's not special, he's just ours.
I remember windows 5 being NT(code name cairo, so what became 2000, but announced in 1997), 95 was windows 4(both were worked on at almost the same time, but had different code lineage)
No idea which one was 6, but vista could make it, if you include all the features they took out. It's funny that vista is the first version of windows that included features NOT on the 1997 list, so it could be the 6.0/
P.S. the actual version numbers were included in release documents from microsoft at one point, we shouldn't need to assume.
They get thrown out in sewage, and nobody thought of actually filtering those biologically active molecules before putting them in an aqueduct. It just means some engineers need to get cracking for a proper filter, or maybe just fine tuning an existing one.
We know they had keyboards as backups for their voice interfaces in ST:TNG, besides, he would be the one to fix "The Computer" when its voice interface would be down, so he would be familiar with "a keyboard" maybe not a qwerty one.
Most likely, Apple just doesn't want to get stuck supporting it. I doubt they have anything against java per se(well except it can run arbitrary apps...) Oh wait...
And Sun is notorious for not letting others have control of the standard...
Hmm guess they will have to supply it themselves... Now the big question becomes, will apple really try to block them? It could be a big stinker either way.