At best it proves how little we understand that law, but there's nothing to say the entropy wasn't balanced by the energy transfer involved(all physical condensations, straight from gas to solid would be a lot worse from a disorder aspect, without factoring the energy involved), and it's quite likely the math will bear this out(but I'm too lazy to do this math).
It also shows how an instinctive understanding of physic laws can lead to misunderstanding those laws. I'm sure someone tried to invalidate a few physics laws when we discovered water actually increased volume when heated from 4 degrees celsius to 0 degrees celsius too. Turned out the law was perfectly fine, as long as you interpreted the whole thing, with the phase change graphs and triple-points, and not just the instinctive understanding: heat it and it expands, then becomes liquid, then expands again and becomes gas.
Trying a simplification of the law, finding it doesn't work, doesn't necessarily mean the law isn't good, it might just be a bad simplification, after all.
I just don't see that happening. Plus while it may not cost them much to reopen production lines, it would take them away from where they want the market to go, Alpha, as an architecture, was a lot more than just the chip, and performed accordingly. It wasn't just a Math Machine, but also an I/O Machine, for several of the choices made(like having a daughterboard and per-cpu memory in my many configurations, kept bus traffic low, and needed basically less Mhz for the same speed as long as cpu localization was enabled) increasing that trend. Alphas and SPARCs used to be favorite workstation chips for that very reason, not just calculations, but I/O(lots of applications require both, like finite elements). Servers are also I/O hungry, and it makes sense that a chip for one would do well in the other. Now I notice that the bang for the buck department, especially if you factor in I/O and other considerations, Itanic doesn't inspire HP, which, as the people who took their PA chips and merged them with Intel's, are the ones who had the most investment in its success, I can only conclude Itanic sunk...
With Intel selling cpus but having to license ASUS/VIA/ABIT etc... for motherboards, Intel would lose part of the profits. Itanic was a lot more than just a new chip, it was an attempt to kick competitors out, leaving HP and Intel with a dominant position. Thankfully for geeks everywhere, it mostly backfired.
I also believe Intel had to give up the alpha somehow, to a consortium of companies interested in the Alpha chip itself, leader of which was Samsung, at the time.
Let's see The government likes to send things into space The government isn't likely to develop a new technology to send things into space cost-effectively There is a company that wants to develop a new technology to send things into space
How about the government just promise to use those guys if they prove to be cost effective? I mean a lot of the problem with public funding has to do with people funding things that do not work, or go over budget, in effect, allowing subsidies to make companies take on some of the worse fiscal aspects of public funding.
Why not just reward people who do the right thing, once it's proven they can do it?
And yes, right of ways, air corridors and related ideas are all things the government can help with. But, let's agree to do it as indirectly as possible, lest 1) the project be tainted by political ideas 2) the project become less efficient
These people want to turn a profit, let's lend em the money to do it, and promise them clients, that's what new businesses need. Let's not promise to bail them if they fail, and perhaps, they'll only try once they're sure.
You might want to mention that hospital management who custs costs often get bonuses based on how much they saved the hospital. Our friends the "free market system advocates" will often forget that it might not save US(the society) or the patients any money, but might pay a lot of golf time for managers.
And we wonder where all the money goes... That's the worse part. The system is inefficient, because we try to prevent abuses, but we are so focused on seeing the forest, we miss the trees. And there are a LOT of trees.
Now mind you, I'm not saying someone who worked their ass off in college for years, then had specialized, harsh training, harsher work conditions and performs life-saving acts isn't worth fair compensation. I'm saying we can't just pick and choose what rules to apply when determining that fair compensation, and I'm also saying that like in computer security, the simpler the rules apply in any given situation, the less likely abuse is.
What rules state a medical professional ears is fair shouldn't change with which hospital he works for, what's the name of his boss, or how many senators are patron at the hospital he works. How much overtime he does every month, how many life that medical team saves a year, and how each professional can implement life and cost saving measures are another thing entirely.
Having the managers(who stand to profit from cost-saving measures) decide how much each employee is worth is borderline dangerous at best.
My understanding is that Daytona was NT4(yes 95 was Chicago), but had most of the features of Cairo, then the next roadmap, Cairo appeared to take on the features they couldn't tack on Daytona.
But exactly, how can you fork a feature list? I'm not sure yet, but it has been done, and repeatedly, by Microsoft(and also by Intel, among other manufacturers, whose roadmap featurelist are quite splittable) before, so I know it's possible, and not just in the software world. The quick and easy version seems to be anytime someone can promise something long term, and change their minds, you can have a fork.
Ummmm, your development workstations should emulate your servers as closely as possible....how else can you ensure that it will run as expected or at all for that matter?
I'd interject that a developer's workstation is the wrong place to put a test environment on, a development server is a better idea. Of course, with most development shops on a budget, it's an easy argument to have developer workstations administered by the developers, to bypass the regular admins(and also bankrupting any argument that the development environment is really like the production environment), just who is checking for those install policies on all the developer's machines? What change control do you have in place for your developers can play nice? How do you make sure developer 1 doesn't try mysql 5, while developer 2 is on mysql 4.2 with mysqli on php5 ? A good development environment is put under the same administrative policies as the operational(production) environment, with only relaxed uptime requirements(rebooting a development server at 2am when the developers sleep is a bit of overkill in a lot of shops, however, if you outsource, you might need to have 7/24 uptime requirements even on a dev box)
One quick eample: PHP5 brings public and private classes/functions/variables to php. This is something I and other develpers would like to use.
Like every other nice to have feature, it's nice to have, stability of your servers is also, obviously a nice to have feature for you. PHP5 was released in july, seriously, how much stress testing have you put on that nice php5-only code before you considered it was production-worthy? Seems to me, and this is just a personal opinion, is that in your shop, the developers took over, and noone noticed(which is nice if you're a developer) but I wonder just how much sleep your operations people are getting...
My understanding was that while you don't lose the patent for not defending it, if you did try to sue someone for infringement, and that defender could point to a case where you ignored a similar infringement, it would weaken their case considerably. On a different note, with the amount(or lack thereof) of work going into finding prior art for patents, especially software patents, right now, I certainly hope they'll at the very least remove the capacity for retroactive patent infringement.
Maybe it just means we have lots of power to do things differently, and manage time effectively, but we never learned how.
Just because we can work at the Starbucks doesn't necessarily mean we should, but on the other hand, because we can, we can pick it as a regular place of work, and decide save an employer some dollars in office space, increasing our employee value.
There are lots of new disruptive technologies out there that can benefit both employers and employees, but only if the employees embrace them, as ways to get themselves more flexibility and other advantages. That means good things, provided we're all willing to become entrepreneurs of a sort, last I checked it was a minority that was ok with being responsible of all their own work conditions. (Lots of people are ok with being responsible for the benefits, but not of the tradeoffs.)
The proportion of it going on is however, likely to increase. The biggest problem we are facing will be effective management of people, we have effective clone management down to an art, and effective management of sheep too, but much more rarely of individuals. A good place to study this, for the researchers reading, would be to poll those successful game company managers, finding out how those who not only make games that rock the players, but mostly, finding the rare few, who make games on time, by feeding and stroking the egos of designers and creators, to get them to overaccomplish themselves instead of being at cross-purposes.
I'm surprised how few people used Ingres before... At least one Univ Lab I went to, years ago, was very pro-ingres(not the r3, but the original, for educational institutions-only) version. Because of some philosophy choices made in the relational algebra.
But then, since these aren't "business" advantages, maybe nobody heard of them except that particular lab...
perhaps you could look at the new alpha5 version 6.0 that's coming out, they seem to be touting it as a sort of filemaker-meets-dbase-meets mysql-backend type of hybrid relational model with an easier to use interface. My impression of their press release is that they're offering a type of "dbase for local, mysql for web" filemaker pro replacement.
I am not going from first-party information here, but I'm sure I read for the feature list for terminal servers under windows, that they allowed connections to X. Good luck getting a product further up the "windows tree" down to the masses.
I have a suggestion, if you're going to encourage people to make binary-only drivers, make a list of GOOD ones too. Some of those binary-only drivers attempt to lock you onto specific kernel versions, otherwise refuse to work in normal usability conditions or cause otherwise troublesome behaviour. I also know at least once "hardware compatiblity list" where hardware is listed as compatible, even if it doesn't perform the function you bought the hardware in the first place, provided it doesn't crash the system. Now normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the storage controller in question performs as an ide controller "without its special storage magic". People see the device name on the compatibility and expect the magic and expect it to work with the full magic, yet it's not "compatible".
If we are going to pressure people into making things, let's make sure they make "good" things.
Because Yahoo does business on behalf of others, and cannot enforce laws selectively(yet) while tracking the origin of both sides of the buiness-transaction-to-be.
I'm still laughing at the "defend their first amendment rights" though, it's a FRENCH court, they have different constitional rights there, an American in France does NOT have a first amendment right to defend. Let's keep the terminology straight people, Yahoo wants to protect what it perceives as the right of free speech of it's business associates, without needing to control their business practices for legality in the French jurisdiction.
To reduce to the absurd, let's pick J. Random Country where Cocaine is legal, J. Random Citizen of said country wants to show an advertisement for a site hosted in his country, can he purchase a google ad for it? Would he be framed for accessory to commit a crime in the USA? Would some district attorney try to get google too? Unfortunately for Google, and for Free Speech. the answer to both questions is most likely yes. In fact, the Great Chinese Firewall is based on exactly this principle: what's legal to display in China is not the same as in another country.
What Yahoo would be smart to do would be to filter content by country, with the filters managed by an agent of that country, it would act responsibly with regards to the courts, but it wouldn't need to know what exactly is legal to show in country X.
Yahoo is unlikely to do so for some time for: a) in some cases, Yahoo makes a profit off transactions, so removing items might remove revenue b) dynamic filtering of dynamically-generated, yet human-input-sourced web pages is non-trivial and might cost a pretty penny in hardware and software and effort to implement.
Being sure you can't be sued for what your clients do however, can be considered priceless.
In the future, I'd recommend the IETF just make sure any standards it endorses includes a poison pill for would-be patenters contributing to standards, that if it changes the rights of patentees in the future, after it's become a standard, to restrict them in any discriminatory way, that it must pay the cost of developing the next, non-compatible(yet non-infringing on the patent) standard.
Let's face it, IBM wouldn't write compatible technology, because they'd have to cross-license their patents to Microsoft in order to get it, but neither can IBM afford to have a product that's incompatible with an IETF standard.
I'm all for rewarding the developer of a technology for doing useful work, I'm all against technologies being discovered useful only once the dollar signs come in. I'm pretty sure the IETF's stance on patents is due to the fact that it has to standardize what are often de-facto standards, picked by market effects to be the best technology. Now Microsoft is abusing the process, in order to use the IETF as a marketing weapon against its competitors.
Now my opinion is that patents and standards are exact opposites, and if you want a patent, you should just stay away from standard bodies until your patent runs out, and they should stay away from you. The patent owner and the standards body just have opposite goals:
The standards body wants to reduce the work and costs involved in increasing the number and likely hood of people using best practices and technologies, by agreeing on them and publicising them. In the knowledge fields, a standard has the force of law, simply because knowledge of a best practice being a best practice, means any other way of doing things has to be justified. The best practice is simply, better. The patent owner wants to make a maximal profit out of whatever use of his technology. That means those who compete with the patent owner cannot use the technology without the patent owner not having what he wants. The difference is fundamental, and a conciliatory position by Microsoft, as generous as it may be, is suspicious, simply because it's against their own interest
Well with the possible exception of removing "random" spam would allow them to become the only source of email advertising for their hotmail users, but in this case, their interest it would be magnified if they can deny it to _someone_, say aol, who would be denied from licensing the patent without some counterpart being presented to Microsoft. Can they exclude AOL reasonably without being discriminatory, I wonder, since IANAL, but I can certainly see their advantage in doing so.
1) the original article was about home computers, not corporate computers, for whom it's far more cost-effective to pay specialists, than to involve everyone in the security aspect of it 2) Using a computer securely is a lot closer to teaching someone not to leave the keys in the ignition. When worms get on a system, the system can be used as an accessory to crime, what's that got to do with a car mechanic?
My own 2) just cancels my own 1) though, there is no thing experts can do to prevent abuse of a trusted computer, if I leave it willfully, or by neglect, accessible by dangerous untrusted third parties.
This means, we need to get this book in the hands of CEOs too. Everyone should know at least enough about computers that they don't get hijacked. It's akin to saying if your neglectant with your car's keys, we'll still pay for your car if it gets stolen, no matter how many times you do the mistake, it's irreseponible.
Safe and secure behaviours should be encouraged, and unsafe and insecure behaviours should have a cost, simply because they aren't unsafe just to the person posing them, but others as well. In a corporate environment, that might mean you, as a professional in the field, need to gather information they need to know to keep their systems more secure, apply patches for them, run firewalls and others. But on the other hand, they also need that information from you on safe behaviours, and they also need to follow the security protocols and policy your department dictates.
Saying it's not their job not to lose their keys is a bit shortsighted. Saying you are providing them with mechanical keyholders that reduce the chance of their ever losing their keys, so that they can concentrate on their work is a little better. But if they don't grasp that their keys are theirs, and should not be shared, you might still have a problem, just a smaller one.
The difference of course between a package unportable because of platform desuetude and an unportable package because of vendor lock-in is quite large.
I see Microsoft's efforts as a swordblow in the water. I see there are very few per-seat licensing schemes of any kind in the open source world, and Microsoft's entirely built on them. They have even used those against their own partners in several situations.
Companies who invest in open source see a valuable trade-off to them, in giving more value to their customers, for the same money, and in not strangling their clients, but helping them.
The Microsoft patent issue in Japan is a case in point. If Microsoft had the proper frame of mind to do business the Open-Source way, they would have settled, admitting they were in the wrong to put that in the contract. There is a social responsability, as well as an understanding your customers can apply value even if they compete with you. Microsoft does not endorse competition publically enough for me to recommend to my clients they partner with Microsoft, even when protected by a contract they have their lawers write. Why would we trust an open source license, which is written by either a third party lawyer, or like the Mozilla, Apple and IBM licenses, basically written by people beholden to someone they are competing with?
But right now Microsoft can't do open source on any significant scale, because those who bought shares in Microsoft believing Microsoft "owned" software to such a degree it could enforce its will on its competitors would be disappointed, and Microsoft would lose more money than it could make through Open Source.
That's the problem Microsoft will have with FOSS, their business practices encouraged some people towards open source, as a form of "breath of fresh air" away from Software Vendors owning the software they ran, and the data they manipulated. That worked beautifully for Microsoft, and made them money. It generated resentment, and now they must pay the full price.
If Microsoft disavows Vendor Lock-In, who will believe them? Yet that's the first step towards open source.
Even those who don't believe Microsoft should be punished will expect an openness and a lack of lock-in that Microsoft will feel is punishment, just form its past actions.
I posit that the dependency tree for most java engines under most software distributions is too erratic right now, and not unified enough to encourage Java for the lazy programmer who doesn't want to depend on a software packaging specialist.
Software packaging specialists usually look at Java and faint(despite new inroads both by projects like InstallAnywhere and jpackage, which are definite improvements).
I can't wait for java package writers to automate package building the way dh-make-perl does on Debian, perhaps then people will see whatever power is in the language.
In the meantime, the work of getting say 15 java packages(including a jvm) on 50+ machines is a major undertaking using native system tools(meaning using scripting languages like perl to download a zip file on windows is cheating...)
How many cross-platform java developers can build.msi AND.rpm or solaris.pkg for their platforms? Sure server environments will have specialists to do that, and for-sale software as well. But for free software advocates, that's a strength of the language turned into a weakness. You support multiple platforms, but you have no control over their policies and practices, so you end up with more work.
Now I'm not saying multi-platform java is bad, but I'm saying that Java could use a page from Debian's packaging book along the way. Managing/upgrading software, and tracking dependencies is an important task that affects developers directly, and most of them are specialists... in something else. Giving them tools(CPAN comes to mind, as a resource, but without structure, it helps less than it could), becomes a must. Being able to make re-distributable packages without a java ide OR reading a manual would help too. (Jars are libraries, not packages, in my book, they do not register with the system to simplify removal, and they can be bundled together for dependency reasons, that excludes them from the "package" definition.
Does this do anything to make Java cool? No, Java is already considered a "barebone" language, it can't be cool anymore, at least in some circles, it does all the good things, and it has no quirky restriction that would limit it to an elite. Can it be a good, useful language yes, can it be used in a bunch of situations? Yes Cool? Java doesn't really want to be cool, it's disruptive to businesses.
I wonder if having them sign a contract(on paper) that they agree to the gpl would help put some of their misconceptions to rest. This is compounded by the fact that a lot of people also get free software from a geek friend, who doesn't always have the time to explain the finer points of the gpl(and some people never directly download software, so they never see the actual gpl until told to look for it). When there is money involved, people take the time to cross the ts and dot the is, when it's free they don't. We need to make sure they do, or else we shouldn't be surprised they misunderstand us.
How many distros show the gpl to you and won't let you proceed until you've read it? (I know such practices are not approved on by a majority of geeks as being of disputable legality in a lot of jurisdictions, and annoying besides) But at least they raise awareness of the GPL, or make an attempt...
Right now because the gpl's restrictions only apply to software distributers/modifiers, the software users misunderstand it. But with the power of GPLed/LGPLed/BSDLed compilers and interpreters and tools. Those users can become producers as well.
Maybe we should think about reaching the users with the message too.
Making a great "brain" game is hard, making a hack and slash fest is "relatively easy".
Any sane PHB worth his salt would stay away from trying to make a Planescape II, even if it HAD sold, simply because if the brain is the game, he'd need to find
1) a group of very smart people 2) a group of very smart, creative people 3) a group of very smart, creative people who work well together 4) a group of very smart, creative people who work well together, and prevent egos from causing cost overruns.
Even Vegas won't give you good odds on #4...
We won't get innovative games until we punish the un-innovative ones with bad sales, VERY bad sales. At least enough for one company to go under, but it has to be explicit... I just don't see that happening, a lot of casual gamers just don't have the exposure to a lot of the innovative, older games, in order to tell them apart from the new rehashed ones.
Didn't I read somewhere parlementarians in the USA 's travel to DC (to meet in congress, I know he's a senator, so it may be different, but I thought it wasn't) was constitutionally protected? Maybe we can hear some funny things coming out due to this mistake.
Except that the point of the blackout is not to save money producing the slot, it's to DENY live coverage, because of legal/marketing reasons. The short version is that someone decided(an executive) that they weren't being paid enough to show you football at that particular time. Using a game as a technical solution will not solve the human situation. Expect instead that radio broadcasts will also have blackouts, because advertisers aren't making enough profits for the radios.
To compound this useful axiom: using a machine to fix a human will a) only work as long as the human stays fixed b) works a lot better if the human wants to be fixed(or at least doesn't mind too much)
In this case, someone would mind if you got to see that game of football. Not because they can't show it to you. Because if they showed it to you, it would cause a market pressure downwards on the perceived value of that football show, and that would affect their profits. Changing the production technology would only help if the NFL accepted that using the game engine to describe the real game is not a cheapening of their product. Smart money says they'd object to using the game engine to describe the real game, and that they'd win on trademark issues, if the events replayed actually happened in a game! You haven't found a way to get around a blackout, you've found something else they have to blackout in your area.
The comparison with software copying is apt: Once the show is produced, it doesn't cost more to show it to ten people than to show it to one(the antenna doesn't need more power if your radio/tv is on or off). But the perceived value is quite literally decuplated if 10 fans se it as opposed to one. So marketing principles militate in favor of making the 10 pay, and if for some reason, you can't collect from two of the ten, you have to make a best effort to deny it to those two. In fact, it makes more sense to charge double, and only show it to five, tell them it's "exclusive" than to charge the same amount to eight.
Why are there so many people who will pay double for an exclusive, is a psychological question I leave as an exercise to the reader.
disclaimer: I'm not a football fan, except when my local team wins, and even then...
A dns server itself does not, but with a mix of ip spoofing and lack of ingress/egress filtering at the isp, a dns cache can be polluted with bad data, that is commonly known as dns cache poisoning, or simply, dns poisoning for short.
The Internet(capital) was a specific instance of internet(no capital) a group of interconnected networks. Now the Internet(capital) has been so successful, it's replaced, all the other "internets" and no, we shouldn't not use the capital. We should just never use the lowercase.
It's the exact opposite of what happened to Kleenex, the paper tissues being replaced by a single brand, because it was so superior.
Slashdot Mirror
In a word, NO.
At best it proves how little we understand that law, but there's nothing to say the entropy wasn't balanced by the energy transfer involved(all physical condensations, straight from gas to solid would be a lot worse from a disorder aspect, without factoring the energy involved), and it's quite likely the math will bear this out(but I'm too lazy to do this math).
It also shows how an instinctive understanding of physic laws can lead to misunderstanding those laws. I'm sure someone tried to invalidate a few physics laws when we discovered water actually increased volume when heated from 4 degrees celsius to 0 degrees celsius too. Turned out the law was perfectly fine, as long as you interpreted the whole thing, with the phase change graphs and triple-points, and not just the instinctive understanding: heat it and it expands, then becomes liquid, then expands again and becomes gas.
Trying a simplification of the law, finding it doesn't work, doesn't necessarily mean the law isn't good, it might just be a bad simplification, after all.
They'd have to admit they were wrong, first.
I just don't see that happening. Plus while it may not cost them much to reopen production lines, it would take them away from where they want the market to go, Alpha, as an architecture, was a lot more than just the chip, and performed accordingly. It wasn't just a Math Machine, but also an I/O Machine, for several of the choices made(like having a daughterboard and per-cpu memory in my many configurations, kept bus traffic low, and needed basically less Mhz for the same speed as long as cpu localization was enabled) increasing that trend. Alphas and SPARCs used to be favorite workstation chips for that very reason, not just calculations, but I/O(lots of applications require both, like finite elements). Servers are also I/O hungry, and it makes sense that a chip for one would do well in the other. Now I notice that the bang for the buck department, especially if you factor in I/O and other considerations, Itanic doesn't inspire HP, which, as the people who took their PA chips and merged them with Intel's, are the ones who had the most investment in its success, I can only conclude Itanic sunk...
With Intel selling cpus but having to license ASUS/VIA/ABIT etc... for motherboards, Intel would lose part of the profits. Itanic was a lot more than just a new chip, it was an attempt to kick competitors out, leaving HP and Intel with a dominant position. Thankfully for geeks everywhere, it mostly backfired.
I also believe Intel had to give up the alpha somehow, to a consortium of companies interested in the Alpha chip itself, leader of which was Samsung, at the time.
Am I the only one who sees a Stephenson's Snow Crash reference in this?
Let's see
The government likes to send things into space
The government isn't likely to develop a new technology to send things into space cost-effectively
There is a company that wants to develop a new technology to send things into space
How about the government just promise to use those guys if they prove to be cost effective? I mean a lot of the problem with public funding has to do with people funding things that do not work, or go over budget, in effect, allowing subsidies to make companies take on some of the worse fiscal aspects of public funding.
Why not just reward people who do the right thing, once it's proven they can do it?
And yes, right of ways, air corridors and related ideas are all things the government can help with. But, let's agree to do it as indirectly as possible, lest
1) the project be tainted by political ideas
2) the project become less efficient
These people want to turn a profit, let's lend em the money to do it, and promise them clients, that's what new businesses need. Let's not promise to bail them if they fail, and perhaps, they'll only try once they're sure.
You might want to mention that hospital management who custs costs often get bonuses based on how much they saved the hospital. Our friends the "free market system advocates" will often forget that it might not save US(the society) or the patients any money, but might pay a lot of golf time for managers.
And we wonder where all the money goes...
That's the worse part. The system is inefficient, because we try to prevent abuses, but we are so focused on seeing the forest, we miss the trees. And there are a LOT of trees.
Now mind you, I'm not saying someone who worked their ass off in college for years, then had specialized, harsh training, harsher work conditions and performs life-saving acts isn't worth fair compensation. I'm saying we can't just pick and choose what rules to apply when determining that fair compensation, and I'm also saying that like in computer security, the simpler the rules apply in any given situation, the less likely abuse is.
What rules state a medical professional ears is fair shouldn't change with which hospital he works for, what's the name of his boss, or how many senators are patron at the hospital he works. How much overtime he does every month, how many life that medical team saves a year, and how each professional can implement life and cost saving measures are another thing entirely.
Having the managers(who stand to profit from cost-saving measures) decide how much each employee is worth is borderline dangerous at best.
My understanding is that Daytona was NT4(yes 95 was Chicago), but had most of the features of Cairo, then the next roadmap, Cairo appeared to take on the features they couldn't tack on Daytona.
But exactly, how can you fork a feature list? I'm not sure yet, but it has been done, and repeatedly, by Microsoft(and also by Intel, among other manufacturers, whose roadmap featurelist are quite splittable) before, so I know it's possible, and not just in the software world. The quick and easy version seems to be anytime someone can promise something long term, and change their minds, you can have a fork.
I'd interject that a developer's workstation is the wrong place to put a test environment on, a development server is a better idea. Of course, with most development shops on a budget, it's an easy argument to have developer workstations administered by the developers, to bypass the regular admins(and also bankrupting any argument that the development environment is really like the production environment), just who is checking for those install policies on all the developer's machines? What change control do you have in place for your developers can play nice? How do you make sure developer 1 doesn't try mysql 5, while developer 2 is on mysql 4.2 with mysqli on php5 ? A good development environment is put under the same administrative policies as the operational(production) environment, with only relaxed uptime requirements(rebooting a development server at 2am when the developers sleep is a bit of overkill in a lot of shops, however, if you outsource, you might need to have 7/24 uptime requirements even on a dev box)
Like every other nice to have feature, it's nice to have, stability of your servers is also, obviously a nice to have feature for you. PHP5 was released in july, seriously, how much stress testing have you put on that nice php5-only code before you considered it was production-worthy? Seems to me, and this is just a personal opinion, is that in your shop, the developers took over, and noone noticed(which is nice if you're a developer) but I wonder just how much sleep your operations people are getting...
My understanding was that while you don't lose the patent for not defending it, if you did try to sue someone for infringement, and that defender could point to a case where you ignored a similar infringement, it would weaken their case considerably.
On a different note, with the amount(or lack thereof) of work going into finding prior art for patents, especially software patents, right now, I certainly hope they'll at the very least remove the capacity for retroactive patent infringement.
Maybe it just means we have lots of power to do things differently, and manage time effectively, but we never learned how.
Just because we can work at the Starbucks doesn't necessarily mean we should, but on the other hand, because we can, we can pick it as a regular place of work, and decide save an employer some dollars in office space, increasing our employee value.
There are lots of new disruptive technologies out there that can benefit both employers and employees, but only if the employees embrace them, as ways to get themselves more flexibility and other advantages. That means good things, provided we're all willing to become entrepreneurs of a sort, last I checked it was a minority that was ok with being responsible of all their own work conditions. (Lots of people are ok with being responsible for the benefits, but not of the tradeoffs.)
The proportion of it going on is however, likely to increase. The biggest problem we are facing will be effective management of people, we have effective clone management down to an art, and effective management of sheep too, but much more rarely of individuals. A good place to study this, for the researchers reading, would be to poll those successful game company managers, finding out how those who not only make games that rock the players, but mostly, finding the rare few, who make games on time, by feeding and stroking the egos of designers and creators, to get them to overaccomplish themselves instead of being at cross-purposes.
I'm surprised how few people used Ingres before... At least one Univ Lab I went to, years ago, was very pro-ingres(not the r3, but the original, for educational institutions-only) version. Because of some philosophy choices made in the relational algebra.
But then, since these aren't "business" advantages, maybe nobody heard of them except that particular lab...
perhaps you could look at the new alpha5 version 6.0 that's coming out, they seem to be touting it as a sort of filemaker-meets-dbase-meets mysql-backend type of hybrid relational model with an easier to use interface. My impression of their press release is that they're offering a type of "dbase for local, mysql for web" filemaker pro replacement.
I am not going from first-party information here, but I'm sure I read for the feature list for terminal servers under windows, that they allowed connections to X. Good luck getting a product further up the "windows tree" down to the masses.
I have a suggestion, if you're going to encourage people to make binary-only drivers, make a list of GOOD ones too.
Some of those binary-only drivers attempt to lock you onto specific kernel versions, otherwise refuse to work in normal usability conditions or cause otherwise troublesome behaviour. I also know at least once "hardware compatiblity list" where hardware is listed as compatible, even if it doesn't perform the function you bought the hardware in the first place, provided it doesn't crash the system. Now normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the storage controller in question performs as an ide controller "without its special storage magic". People see the device name on the compatibility and expect the magic and expect it to work with the full magic, yet it's not "compatible".
If we are going to pressure people into making things, let's make sure they make "good" things.
Because Yahoo does business on behalf of others, and cannot enforce laws selectively(yet) while tracking the origin of both sides of the buiness-transaction-to-be.
I'm still laughing at the "defend their first amendment rights" though, it's a FRENCH court, they have different constitional rights there, an American in France does NOT have a first amendment right to defend. Let's keep the terminology straight people, Yahoo wants to protect what it perceives as the right of free speech of it's business associates, without needing to control their business practices for legality in the French jurisdiction.
To reduce to the absurd, let's pick J. Random Country where Cocaine is legal, J. Random Citizen of said country wants to show an advertisement for a site hosted in his country, can he purchase a google ad for it? Would he be framed for accessory to commit a crime in the USA? Would some district attorney try to get google too? Unfortunately for Google, and for Free Speech. the answer to both questions is most likely yes. In fact, the Great Chinese Firewall is based on exactly this principle: what's legal to display in China is not the same as in another country.
What Yahoo would be smart to do would be to filter content by country, with the filters managed by an agent of that country, it would act responsibly with regards to the courts, but it wouldn't need to know what exactly is legal to show in country X.
Yahoo is unlikely to do so for some time for:
a) in some cases, Yahoo makes a profit off transactions, so removing items might remove revenue
b) dynamic filtering of dynamically-generated, yet human-input-sourced web pages is non-trivial and might cost a pretty penny in hardware and software and effort to implement.
Being sure you can't be sued for what your clients do however, can be considered priceless.
Their word, it's not worth much, but it's there.
In the future, I'd recommend the IETF just make sure any standards it endorses includes a poison pill for would-be patenters contributing to standards, that if it changes the rights of patentees in the future, after it's become a standard, to restrict them in any discriminatory way, that it must pay the cost of developing the next, non-compatible(yet non-infringing on the patent) standard.
Let's face it, IBM wouldn't write compatible technology, because they'd have to cross-license their patents to Microsoft in order to get it, but neither can IBM afford to have a product that's incompatible with an IETF standard.
I'm all for rewarding the developer of a technology for doing useful work, I'm all against technologies being discovered useful only once the dollar signs come in. I'm pretty sure the IETF's stance on patents is due to the fact that it has to standardize what are often de-facto standards, picked by market effects to be the best technology. Now Microsoft is abusing the process, in order to use the IETF as a marketing weapon against its competitors.
Now my opinion is that patents and standards are exact opposites, and if you want a patent, you should just stay away from standard bodies until your patent runs out, and they should stay away from you. The patent owner and the standards body just have opposite goals:
The standards body wants to reduce the work and costs involved in increasing the number and likely hood of people using best practices and technologies, by agreeing on them and publicising them. In the knowledge fields, a standard has the force of law, simply because knowledge of a best practice being a best practice, means any other way of doing things has to be justified. The best practice is simply, better. The patent owner wants to make a maximal profit out of whatever use of his technology. That means those who compete with the patent owner cannot use the technology without the patent owner not having what he wants. The difference is fundamental, and a conciliatory position by Microsoft, as generous as it may be, is suspicious, simply because it's against their own interest
Well with the possible exception of removing "random" spam would allow them to become the only source of email advertising for their hotmail users, but in this case, their interest it would be magnified if they can deny it to _someone_, say aol, who would be denied from licensing the patent without some counterpart being presented to Microsoft. Can they exclude AOL reasonably without being discriminatory, I wonder, since IANAL, but I can certainly see their advantage in doing so.
1) the original article was about home computers, not corporate computers, for whom it's far more cost-effective to pay specialists, than to involve everyone in the security aspect of it
2) Using a computer securely is a lot closer to teaching someone not to leave the keys in the ignition. When worms get on a system, the system can be used as an accessory to crime, what's that got to do with a car mechanic?
My own 2) just cancels my own 1) though, there is no thing experts can do to prevent abuse of a trusted computer, if I leave it willfully, or by neglect, accessible by dangerous untrusted third parties.
This means, we need to get this book in the hands of CEOs too. Everyone should know at least enough about computers that they don't get hijacked. It's akin to saying if your neglectant with your car's keys, we'll still pay for your car if it gets stolen, no matter how many times you do the mistake, it's irreseponible.
Safe and secure behaviours should be encouraged, and unsafe and insecure behaviours should have a cost, simply because they aren't unsafe just to the person posing them, but others as well. In a corporate environment, that might mean you, as a professional in the field, need to gather information they need to know to keep their systems more secure, apply patches for them, run firewalls and others. But on the other hand, they also need that information from you on safe behaviours, and they also need to follow the security protocols and policy your department dictates.
Saying it's not their job not to lose their keys is a bit shortsighted. Saying you are providing them with mechanical keyholders that reduce the chance of their ever losing their keys, so that they can concentrate on their work is a little better. But if they don't grasp that their keys are theirs, and should not be shared, you might still have a problem, just a smaller one.
The difference of course between a package unportable because of platform desuetude and an unportable package because of vendor lock-in is quite large.
I see Microsoft's efforts as a swordblow in the water. I see there are very few per-seat licensing schemes of any kind in the open source world, and Microsoft's entirely built on them. They have even used those against their own partners in several situations.
Companies who invest in open source see a valuable trade-off to them, in giving more value to their customers, for the same money, and in not strangling their clients, but helping them.
The Microsoft patent issue in Japan is a case in point. If Microsoft had the proper frame of mind to do business the Open-Source way, they would have settled, admitting they were in the wrong to put that in the contract. There is a social responsability, as well as an understanding your customers can apply value even if they compete with you. Microsoft does not endorse competition publically enough for me to recommend to my clients they partner with Microsoft, even when protected by a contract they have their lawers write. Why would we trust an open source license, which is written by either a third party lawyer, or like the Mozilla, Apple and IBM licenses, basically written by people beholden to someone they are competing with?
But right now Microsoft can't do open source on any significant scale, because those who bought shares in Microsoft believing Microsoft "owned" software to such a degree it could enforce its will on its competitors would be disappointed, and Microsoft would lose more money than it could make through Open Source.
That's the problem Microsoft will have with FOSS, their business practices encouraged some people towards open source, as a form of "breath of fresh air" away from Software Vendors owning the software they ran, and the data they manipulated. That worked beautifully for Microsoft, and made them money. It generated resentment, and now they must pay the full price.
If Microsoft disavows Vendor Lock-In, who will believe them? Yet that's the first step towards open source.
Even those who don't believe Microsoft should be punished will expect an openness and a lack of lock-in that Microsoft will feel is punishment, just form its past actions.
I posit that the dependency tree for most java engines under most software distributions is too erratic right now, and not unified enough to encourage Java for the lazy programmer who doesn't want to depend on a software packaging specialist.
.msi AND .rpm or solaris .pkg for their platforms? Sure server environments will have specialists to do that, and for-sale software as well. But for free software advocates, that's a strength of the language turned into a weakness. You support multiple platforms, but you have no control over their policies and practices, so you end up with more work.
Software packaging specialists usually look at Java and faint(despite new inroads both by projects like InstallAnywhere and jpackage, which are definite improvements).
I can't wait for java package writers to automate package building the way dh-make-perl does on Debian, perhaps then people will see whatever power is in the language.
In the meantime, the work of getting say 15 java packages(including a jvm) on 50+ machines is a major undertaking using native system tools(meaning using scripting languages like perl to download a zip file on windows is cheating...)
How many cross-platform java developers can build
Now I'm not saying multi-platform java is bad, but I'm saying that Java could use a page from Debian's packaging book along the way. Managing/upgrading software, and tracking dependencies is an important task that affects developers directly, and most of them are specialists... in something else. Giving them tools(CPAN comes to mind, as a resource, but without structure, it helps less than it could), becomes a must. Being able to make re-distributable packages without a java ide OR reading a manual would help too. (Jars are libraries, not packages, in my book, they do not register with the system to simplify removal, and they can be bundled together for dependency reasons, that excludes them from the "package" definition.
Does this do anything to make Java cool? No, Java is already considered a "barebone" language, it can't be cool anymore, at least in some circles, it does all the good things, and it has no quirky restriction that would limit it to an elite. Can it be a good, useful language yes, can it be used in a bunch of situations? Yes
Cool? Java doesn't really want to be cool, it's disruptive to businesses.
I wonder if having them sign a contract(on paper) that they agree to the gpl would help put some of their misconceptions to rest.
This is compounded by the fact that a lot of people also get free software from a geek friend, who doesn't always have the time to explain the finer points of the gpl(and some people never directly download software, so they never see the actual gpl until told to look for it).
When there is money involved, people take the time to cross the ts and dot the is, when it's free they don't. We need to make sure they do, or else we shouldn't be surprised they misunderstand us.
How many distros show the gpl to you and won't let you proceed until you've read it? (I know such practices are not approved on by a majority of geeks as being of disputable legality in a lot of jurisdictions, and annoying besides) But at least they raise awareness of the GPL, or make an attempt...
Right now because the gpl's restrictions only apply to software distributers/modifiers, the software users misunderstand it. But with the power of GPLed/LGPLed/BSDLed compilers and interpreters and tools. Those users can become producers as well.
Maybe we should think about reaching the users with the message too.
Once they have 90% marketshare, it will be a bit late to realize they're untrustworthy won't it?
It's not just sales...
Making a great "brain" game is hard, making a hack and slash fest is "relatively easy".
Any sane PHB worth his salt would stay away from trying to make a Planescape II, even if it HAD sold, simply because if the brain is the game, he'd need to find
1) a group of very smart people
2) a group of very smart, creative people
3) a group of very smart, creative people who work well together
4) a group of very smart, creative people who work well together, and prevent egos from causing cost overruns.
Even Vegas won't give you good odds on #4...
We won't get innovative games until we punish the un-innovative ones with bad sales, VERY bad sales.
At least enough for one company to go under, but it has to be explicit... I just don't see that happening, a lot of casual gamers just don't have the exposure to a lot of the innovative, older games, in order to tell them apart from the new rehashed ones.
Didn't I read somewhere parlementarians in the USA 's travel to DC (to meet in congress, I know he's a senator, so it may be different, but I thought it wasn't) was constitutionally protected? Maybe we can hear some funny things coming out due to this mistake.
Except that the point of the blackout is not to save money producing the slot, it's to DENY live coverage, because of legal/marketing reasons.
The short version is that someone decided(an executive) that they weren't being paid enough to show you football at that particular time.
Using a game as a technical solution will not solve the human situation. Expect instead that radio broadcasts will also have blackouts, because advertisers aren't making enough profits for the radios.
To compound this useful axiom: using a machine to fix a human will
a) only work as long as the human stays fixed
b) works a lot better if the human wants to be fixed(or at least doesn't mind too much)
In this case, someone would mind if you got to see that game of football. Not because they can't show it to you. Because if they showed it to you, it would cause a market pressure downwards on the perceived value of that football show, and that would affect their profits. Changing the production technology would only help if the NFL accepted that using the game engine to describe the real game is not a cheapening of their product. Smart money says they'd object to using the game engine to describe the real game, and that they'd win on trademark issues, if the events replayed actually happened in a game! You haven't found a way to get around a blackout, you've found something else they have to blackout in your area.
The comparison with software copying is apt:
Once the show is produced, it doesn't cost more to show it to ten people than to show it to one(the antenna doesn't need more power if your radio/tv is on or off). But the perceived value is quite literally decuplated if 10 fans se it as opposed to one. So marketing principles militate in favor of making the 10 pay, and if for some reason, you can't collect from two of the ten, you have to make a best effort to deny it to those two. In fact, it makes more sense to charge double, and only show it to five, tell them it's "exclusive" than to charge the same amount to eight.
Why are there so many people who will pay double for an exclusive, is a psychological question I leave as an exercise to the reader.
disclaimer: I'm not a football fan, except when my local team wins, and even then...
A dns server itself does not, but with a mix of ip spoofing and lack of ingress/egress filtering at the isp, a dns cache can be polluted with bad data, that is commonly known as dns cache poisoning, or simply, dns poisoning for short.
The Internet(capital) was a specific instance of internet(no capital) a group of interconnected networks. Now the Internet(capital) has been so successful, it's replaced, all the other "internets" and no, we shouldn't not use the capital. We should just never use the lowercase.
It's the exact opposite of what happened to Kleenex, the paper tissues being replaced by a single brand, because it was so superior.