send out in PDF if I don't want people messing with what I send (the usual situation), or
send in whatever format will be easiest for the recipient, if I do want him to be able to modify it.
#3 is usually one of the MS formats. But that might change.
Soemthing I don't understand is why QuickOffice, which should be very concerned about bandwidth and storage issues, would choose to use MS formats with all their bloat? Seems like they are making themselves vulnerable to competitors with superior technology.
If info in parent post is true, it suggests that Microsoft was not quite as careful in setting up one of the backdoors as they should have been.
Of course that's always a problem with backdoors. They have to be non-obvious to avoid detection, so they need to use more complex mechanisms than you'd find in straightforward coding. Combined with the need to keep the staff that knows about them as small as possible, you can't really debug them adequately, either. You'd think under these conditions, Microsoft would simply throw in the towel and compete honestly, on a level playing field. With their share of the market, they don't really need these clever, garage-start-up, entrepreneurial gimmicks any more.
But I guess Upper Management doesn't think that would be as much fun, or something.
Yes, for Vista it has certainly been a bad summery. The forecast for the upcoming wintery doesn't look so good, either.
Pun-ishments aside, those who RATFA know that the fault is in the Vista kernel, it is consistently triggered by Kapersky, but is also triggered by other software, and by implication it is not consistently repeatable and therefore cannot be easily worked around.
On my WinXP home machine, I routinely copy more than 16,400 files when doing a full data backup to an external drive, which I do two or three nights a week. Even if Vista was perfect in every other way, this would be a show-stopper for me.
I think that for Jammie's case to get to the point where she can now contest the fine, the guilty plea was necessary. I hope that for all our sakes she wins this battle.
Sir, do you think the word "significant" can only signify the narrow mathematical meaning?
How then do you work with significant historical figures like the Czars or Charlemagne? Can you add 'em and devide 'em? Can you slide 'em on your rule? Can you punch 'em in your calculator, can you... ne'er mind, these be the words of a fool.
Come down from your ivy-covered tower and mix a bit more with the general populace. Learn to recognize the universal truth that when a dollar sign precedes the digits, $1,000.00 is always more significant than $12.34
First: Many calculators being marketed to high school students come with a CD of practice problems. Different models teach different arithmetic methods of handling identical problems, depending on the particular strengths of the model. Some models have a "natural expression" feature, others allow easy modification of multi-line processes, and I'm pretty sure there are still some RPN calculators available at low cost.
So buying two or three calculators that have different feature sets and comparing how each handles the same general problem would be one way of sharpening the old skills. Take some notes and blog about your findings, and you might make some new friends, too. These calculators range in price from about 10USD to 40USD, so getting a trio or foursome would cost less than the new price of a set of Algebra 101, Discrete Math 101, and Statistics 101 textbooks.
Second: In the US, there are several CDs available for about 10USD each that provide preparatory exercises for the math section of the SAT exams. Working through one of these would assure that you have covered all the basics.
Third: But in my personal experience, I found that the best practice is to reserve a foot of personal library shelf space for math books, and fill that with the textbooks, "Blah Made Simple" booklets, and so forth that cover the various subjects and that I am familiar with. When I encounter a kind of problem that I haven't had to deal with for a while, I can almost always locate it quickly in these books and review how to do the work. For instance, it has been more than thirty years since I last had to use matrix algebra, and I don't remember the first thing about it. But if on Tuesday I find I run into some matrix problems, I'm confident that by Thursday I'll have completed a review of the subject and I'll be on my way to the answer on Friday.
In short, don't bother attempting to remember how to do something you aren't going to need to do very often. Instead, find a way to assure that you can quickly look up and review the process when you need to do so. A personal library is an extension of the mind.
it's frightening what the power of an (almost) full monopoly on internet seaching services can do.
Something else that is also frightening is where unsubstantiated assertions like the one above can lead to. It took me less than a minute to google up
Search engine Usage Comparisons for 2006 and find that Google has between 46% and 48% of the market. Second place goes to Yahoo with between 27% and 29%.
Google is the market leader, and strongly so. However this is a strongly competitive market. Google is a long way from having a monopoly and the market is such that it probably will never get any closer to that than it is now.
Concerns about the exercise of monopolistic power on the internet are baseless; people should reserve their anxiety energies for more realistic worries, like whether they'll be struck by lightning tomorrow.
[Google's policy is] stifling criticism of those hiding behind baseless trademark claims. This is a demonstration of just how dangerous Google's position of monopolistic power over information has become.
Oh fer chrissake, it's an ADVERTISEMENT! Like every other advertisement, this has no relationship to information in any way.
This story is not about Google doing any kind of censorship or interfering in any way with the flow of information. This story is only about Google refusing to take money for some advertising.
I would hope that anyone who votes in any elections anywhere in the world can make the distinction between information and paid advertising. Democracies depend on that kind of discrimination.
I think there is a misunderstanding in parent post about what constitutes a gift economy. While the post baldly states that FOSS is not a gift economy, it goes on to attribute to FOSS several of the core qualities of a gift economy: respect of individual rights, especially wrt contributions; massive collaboration on large projects; recognition of donations, etc. These are not important concepts in capitalist, socialist, or communist economic models, but they are critical to the operation of a gift economy.
These other posts on this thread may help clarify the nature of a gift economy:
This AC posts a good description of the benefits of working in a gift economy, although he does not appear to realize that is what he is talking about;
It should also be recognized that a software development model is before anything else an economic model. For its whole point is to marshal resources to bring forth new wealth, perhaps in the form of a new tool that will help others create or conserve wealth, or otherwise enrich somebody's life.
FOSS is not capitalistic. Nor is is socialistic, nor communistic. It doesn't fit any of the three kinds of economic models that have been presented in business classes in the last 50+ years.
It does, however, fit in with the models of village and tribal economies that, as a group, are often called "gift economies". The key here perhaps is knowing that in any gift economy, the gift is recognized as coming with obligations that must be fulfilled. Often these obligations cannot be satisfied by direct payment back to the giver: they must be satisfied through some kind of gift to a recognized proxie. Such as the FOSS community as a whole.
Part of my reason for taking time to write these posts is because in stimulating these kinds of discussion on Slashdot I am discharging a small part of the obligations I owe to Linus and untold others for the wealth of software they have provided me.
A good summation. See also this AC comment,, which expands on the details of 'mutual selfishness', and my reply to that, which describes this kind of gift economy with something more than my original sound bite.
I hope parent post gets modded up. It is a good expansion on my very simplistic description of the FOSS gift economy.
- It does cost to share....
- Sharing is often the right business move....
-... If I FOSS that project, it will help increase the reliability and utility of that tool for me...
Gift economies are not simple; they rely on gift exchanges, and on concepts of debt, repayment, and conversions between different kinds of valuation that make the global financial markets look ridiculously simple. While Apache is great because lots of programmers have been contributing code to the effort, it is also great because lots of sys admins have been contributing their thoughts about how it could be improved, and lots of web designers have been contributing by marketing Apache to their clients. Bug reports have at least as much value as bug fixes. Input into design, suggestions for improved interfaces, and increasing the user base through evangelism are all important ways of contributing back to the community.
The FOSS gift economy is not based on altruism. It is one of those global village things. It is a recognition that if I make a little effort to enrich the lives of others today, my own life will be enriched in ways that I cannot predict, but which nevertheless are very real.
I use Linux, in part because I didn't want to give you any money anymore, so could you please explain to me why you think I owe you money?
This quote from Ballmer that is posted on Groklaw under the section "[Update 2]", appears to be the Microsoft explanation:
Because our battle is not sort of business model to business model. Our battle is product to product, Windows versus Linux, Office versus OpenOffice.
But he doesn't stop there. He immediately continues by directly contradicting himself, and talking about the differences in the FOSS and Microsoft business models:
The only other thing I would say that is probably germane is, we spend a lot of money, the rest of the commercial industry spends a lot of money on R & D. We've spent a lot of money licensing patents, when people come to us and say, "Hey, this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual propery, we'll either get a court judgment or we'll pay a big check. And we are going to -- I think it is important that the Open Source products also have an obligation to participate in the same way in the intellectual property regime.
In other words, FOSS should be required to use the same wastefully expensive business model that Microsoft uses.
I don't think he gets FOSS. I am beginning to wonder if his commitment to the traditional corporate culture of 1982 is so great that he truly cannot see that FOSS is based on an entirely different cultural platform. FOSS is a kind of gift economy where those involved are saying "Hey, since it doesn't cost me to share what I'm doing, I'll gladly share it with everyone, and I expect others to give something back to all of us, too." Where traditional capitalist cultures like Ballmer's see product improvement as a way of getting a bigger slice of the pie, FOSS focuses on making the entire pie bigger so everyone gets a larger slice.
To those who are less culturally advanced, the clear successes of FOSS must seem to be magic. Apache, Blender, Firefox, and the others must all seem to have been created out of empty aether, and to be without any solid foundations. Clark's observation about advanced technology seemingly also applies to business models: if they are significantly advanced, their mechanisms of operation will seem to be magic to the businessmen of twenty-five years ago who haven't bothered to keep up.
Unless I'm mistaken (I know that its scary to contemplate that somebody posting on Slashdot might actually be wrong), you could put links to those messages that have the good links into your message. That would actually have saved some people from wading through the wasted discussions and provided credit where it is due. The result would look something like this link back to the parent post. But hopefully it would provide some useful content.
But this is Slashdot, where the simple technological solution is oft eschewed in favor of something with a few more convolutions...
admission that a crime occured is sufficient reason.
I had to look up a few things to figure out what is wrong with parent post. The statement is in fact correct, but what constitutes an "admission" under law is limited.
In this instance, the person making the statement did so anonymously. In fact he has gone to some effort to assure that he cannot be associated with any of his assertions. So these assertions carry no more weight than any other hearsay. The anonymous gossiping of the crowd is excluded from the law, and this blogger is no more than a loud voice in a big, crowded public room.
The blogger's statements are hearsay because they are anonymous. I doubt that they meet all the other criteria of an "admission", but they certainly do not meet this one. Essent Healthcare cannot show that a crime has been committed based only on this hearsay. With no indication that there has been a crime, there is no basis for Essent's investigation of the blogger.
It also should be noted that violations of HIPAA regulations are federal offenses. If Essent Healthcare has a legitimate way of identifying that a criminal violation of HIPAA has occurred, they are obligated to report this to the feds, who will then do the investigation and prosecution.
can't they just call up microsoft in the US directly?
For some things. Not for, say, face to face help in preparing a proposal to the bosses for converting the Advertising Department to Vista... which is the kind of support that Microsoft really likes to provide.
Doubtless there are other kinds of assistance that MS provides locally that are not available through Redmond. Especially wrt social networking and other kinds of "soft" support.
The phenomenon is called "dancing on the grave of the enemy". It has a very long history and it seems to be embedded in every culture. I think we've got to accept it as a part of our humanity.
That said, like any other dance, this one can be done with style and grace. Or with so much vulgarity that it can be painful to watch it. One can only hope that by the time the typical slashdotter graduates from high school, he will no longer be so very far to the left on the bell curve of socially acceptable expressiveness.
This is not easy stuff to learn, though. It is far easier to learn to show acceptance in defeat than to show graciousness in victory.
Will someone who understands bankruptcies explain to me how SCO's bankruptcy can continue when the financials they submitted are so clearly wrong?
A court on the East Coast has declared that SCO has been holding assets belonging to Novell.
SCO apparently is including those assets in its balance sheet, and only referring to the matter in the way an accountant would treat a minor unknown, like "Estimated Office Inventory Shrinkage, Current Quarter". However the theft involved is not minor; it probably exceeds the sum of SCO's reported profits over the last few years.
How can the Utah bankruptcy court accept the financial statements that SCO has submitted as valid? How can SCO get protected status if its application failed to meet the requirements?
This case strikes me as being like a pawn shop that has declared bankruptcy after being found guilty of fencing stolen property. The bankruptcy cannot go forward until an investigation to determine how much of its current inventory is stolen property is completed.
It seems to me that this is one of those instances where the bankruptcy cannot proceed until the amount of the theft has been determined. I would think that SCO's bankruptcy request should be denied or nullified, and SCO should be told it cannot submit one until it can accurately produce the required financial statements.
Is it any wonder that most of SCO's accounting staff have left? Being associated with the financials SCO provided the bankruptcy court would be a career stopper for an accountant.
Ecuadoran corporations that expect local support of the software they license from Microsoft may feel that this is a rather big thing. This isn't a "parking ticket" where Microsoft has to pay a fine. This is a "nobody is allowed to get in the building" show stopper.
CIOs of corporations in other countries now need to consider a new kind of risk as they decide whether to stay with the same vendor or explore other options. Part of choosing a software vendor has always involved assessing whether that vendor was likely to go out of business and leave your company orphaned, without support. From now on, it is also going to be necessary to assess whether the vendor is going to get shut down for illegal activities, and leave you without support.
Uh, thanks Microsoft for so poignantly demonstrating that this risk exists.
This means that for at least seven days, any Ecuadoran corporation that needs Microsoft support is SOL [Sh*t Outta Luck]. That might cause some ripples in the mining industry, for instance.
I don't see how this benefits the worldwide adoption of Vista or Office 2007. This is an entirely new avenue by which a corporate user of Microsoft products might find their operations temporarily "locally orphaned"— that is, without any local vendor support. I'm pretty sure that this event has not been received favorably in Redmond. I'm thinking that it is the kind of event that throws a chair when it bubbles up to the top.
Who would have guessed that when doing comparative risk assessments of OSs and office suites, one of the factors that now needs to be considered is whether the software vendor will comply with local laws?
Think of these XOs as a very cheap way of distributing all the textbooks needed to take a child through the K-12 years.
After contemplating the cost of an XO vs. the cost of printing and shipping several hundred pounds of textbooks (and dry bookshelves to hold them all), it might be worthwhile to look at what can happen after K-12, through initiatives like MIT's OpenCourseWare.
What it isn't designed for that really makes a difference is the individual purchaser market, in the US or elsewhere.
True enough, but the statement really needs to be generalized:
XO isn't designed for sale, in any way. There is nothing proprietary about it. The software is all FOSS, and the hardware is basically patent-free. Under these conditions, there is no way for a would-be marketer to assure that his margins would be sufficient to recover his start-up costs.
The XO was designed through a very interesting process of contributed intellectual labor. There is literally no way to capitalize on that.
Just think, though. The XO will put the Gutenberg library of books into the hands of students for a fraction of the cost of buying and shipping the hardcopies of these classics.
From TFA: "Linux is best for technically savvy users or for people whose needs are so basic that they will never need anything other than the bundled software"
Which basically translates to not for me for the average person, being neither a geek nor wanting to have the self-image of being 'basic'.
TFA's choice of words was unfortunate and inaccurate. It was especially bad since it is the kind of quick sound bite that cursory readers of TFA are going to take away with them.
Taken in context, what TFA was trying to say is that dweebs who have to have the very latest $500 pocket toy as a crutch for their low self-esteem should stick with Windows unless they are technically savvy.
And in the paragraphs before that sound bite, TFA did say that anyone who is not pocket toy dweeb will find that migrating to Linux is easier than re-installing their current Windows or migrating to Vista. And that finding, installing, and upgrading quality FOSS applications is a lot simpler and very much less expensive than the Windows way of doing these things.
some people are really trying to pimp up the gimp recently.
Thing is, it isn't, and never has been as good as photoshop, so the professional world aren't going to accept it while photoshop is better.
I keep coming back to this topic, because there is something important here that hasn't been said yet. Parent post is as good a place to hang this as any.
First, others have pointed out that TFA does not suggest that the Gimp has any kind of role in professional photography. Parent post should be modded to oblivion as it is way off topic. And it is attempting to drag a lot of the discussion away from the topic.
Now to my rant:
I am a hobby photographer. I got my first 35mm camera around 1967. I went digital in 2003. I went digital because I could afford Paint Shop Pro, and in it I saw the promise of being able to do all the neat things that could be done in the darkroom that I could never afford.
It didn't turn out quite as I expected. Software like PSP, Photoshop, or the Gimp is not a "digital darkroom" as I had thought. And all those techniques I had read about in wet photography magazines didn't apply. Ansel Adams has little to say about manipulating digital images: this is a different art form. The only thing wet photography and digital photography have in common is the use of a camera as the initial capture device.
Here's the thing: I'm not a terribly inspired photographer. That Muse doesn't speak to me. I take pictures that are usually technically adequate under good conditions, but the composition is flawed or there are background or foreground problems, or the conditions were not good and I lack the techniques to know how to manage difficult situations. The black labrador retriever in front of the black rock at dusk... if you take photos, you know what I'm talking about.
PSP or the Gimp let me work with these images and extract something that is consistently better than what came out of the camera, and sometimes rather good.
But the key here is realizing that this is a subtractive process. I am making my pictures better by selectively removing information. I am deliberately taking away chunks of reality. I am not a painter who treats the photograph as a canvas to which he adds stuff. I am a sculptor working with mallet and chisel to get the hell rid of the junk that doesn't belong in my picture.
There are probably tens of thousands more bits of information in a good wet photograph than any person can absorb. There are hundreds more bits in my poorest photographs than what I need to make the impression I want on the viewer. The Gimp is perfectly adequate at getting rid of the stuff that is in the way. Photoshop might offer a few more techniques, but I don't need to use those. I've got more than enough different techniques available to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I do the SANE thing:
#3 is usually one of the MS formats. But that might change.
Soemthing I don't understand is why QuickOffice, which should be very concerned about bandwidth and storage issues, would choose to use MS formats with all their bloat? Seems like they are making themselves vulnerable to competitors with superior technology.
So the problem is not in the kernel? It's because the OLE chrome doesn't work right with the extended attributes chrome?
And even so, Microsoft can't fix it in SP1?
This news is both strange and disturbing.
Hmmm.
If info in parent post is true, it suggests that Microsoft was not quite as careful in setting up one of the backdoors as they should have been.
Of course that's always a problem with backdoors. They have to be non-obvious to avoid detection, so they need to use more complex mechanisms than you'd find in straightforward coding. Combined with the need to keep the staff that knows about them as small as possible, you can't really debug them adequately, either. You'd think under these conditions, Microsoft would simply throw in the towel and compete honestly, on a level playing field. With their share of the market, they don't really need these clever, garage-start-up, entrepreneurial gimmicks any more.
But I guess Upper Management doesn't think that would be as much fun, or something.
Yes, for Vista it has certainly been a bad summery. The forecast for the upcoming wintery doesn't look so good, either.
Pun-ishments aside, those who RATFA know that the fault is in the Vista kernel, it is consistently triggered by Kapersky, but is also triggered by other software, and by implication it is not consistently repeatable and therefore cannot be easily worked around.
On my WinXP home machine, I routinely copy more than 16,400 files when doing a full data backup to an external drive, which I do two or three nights a week. Even if Vista was perfect in every other way, this would be a show-stopper for me.
I think that for Jammie's case to get to the point where she can now contest the fine, the guilty plea was necessary. I hope that for all our sakes she wins this battle.
Sir, do you think the word "significant" can only signify the narrow mathematical meaning?
How then do you work with significant historical figures like the Czars or Charlemagne? Can you add 'em and devide 'em? Can you slide 'em on your rule? Can you punch 'em in your calculator, can you... ne'er mind, these be the words of a fool.
Come down from your ivy-covered tower and mix a bit more with the general populace. Learn to recognize the universal truth that when a dollar sign precedes the digits, $1,000.00 is always more significant than $12.34
First: Many calculators being marketed to high school students come with a CD of practice problems. Different models teach different arithmetic methods of handling identical problems, depending on the particular strengths of the model. Some models have a "natural expression" feature, others allow easy modification of multi-line processes, and I'm pretty sure there are still some RPN calculators available at low cost.
So buying two or three calculators that have different feature sets and comparing how each handles the same general problem would be one way of sharpening the old skills. Take some notes and blog about your findings, and you might make some new friends, too. These calculators range in price from about 10USD to 40USD, so getting a trio or foursome would cost less than the new price of a set of Algebra 101, Discrete Math 101, and Statistics 101 textbooks.
Second: In the US, there are several CDs available for about 10USD each that provide preparatory exercises for the math section of the SAT exams. Working through one of these would assure that you have covered all the basics.
Third: But in my personal experience, I found that the best practice is to reserve a foot of personal library shelf space for math books, and fill that with the textbooks, "Blah Made Simple" booklets, and so forth that cover the various subjects and that I am familiar with. When I encounter a kind of problem that I haven't had to deal with for a while, I can almost always locate it quickly in these books and review how to do the work. For instance, it has been more than thirty years since I last had to use matrix algebra, and I don't remember the first thing about it. But if on Tuesday I find I run into some matrix problems, I'm confident that by Thursday I'll have completed a review of the subject and I'll be on my way to the answer on Friday.
In short, don't bother attempting to remember how to do something you aren't going to need to do very often. Instead, find a way to assure that you can quickly look up and review the process when you need to do so. A personal library is an extension of the mind.
Something else that is also frightening is where unsubstantiated assertions like the one above can lead to. It took me less than a minute to google up Search engine Usage Comparisons for 2006 and find that Google has between 46% and 48% of the market. Second place goes to Yahoo with between 27% and 29%.
Google is the market leader, and strongly so. However this is a strongly competitive market. Google is a long way from having a monopoly and the market is such that it probably will never get any closer to that than it is now.
Concerns about the exercise of monopolistic power on the internet are baseless; people should reserve their anxiety energies for more realistic worries, like whether they'll be struck by lightning tomorrow.
Oh fer chrissake, it's an ADVERTISEMENT! Like every other advertisement, this has no relationship to information in any way.
This story is not about Google doing any kind of censorship or interfering in any way with the flow of information. This story is only about Google refusing to take money for some advertising.
I would hope that anyone who votes in any elections anywhere in the world can make the distinction between information and paid advertising. Democracies depend on that kind of discrimination.
I think there is a misunderstanding in parent post about what constitutes a gift economy. While the post baldly states that FOSS is not a gift economy, it goes on to attribute to FOSS several of the core qualities of a gift economy: respect of individual rights, especially wrt contributions; massive collaboration on large projects; recognition of donations, etc. These are not important concepts in capitalist, socialist, or communist economic models, but they are critical to the operation of a gift economy.
These other posts on this thread may help clarify the nature of a gift economy:
It should also be recognized that a software development model is before anything else an economic model. For its whole point is to marshal resources to bring forth new wealth, perhaps in the form of a new tool that will help others create or conserve wealth, or otherwise enrich somebody's life.
FOSS is not capitalistic. Nor is is socialistic, nor communistic. It doesn't fit any of the three kinds of economic models that have been presented in business classes in the last 50+ years.
It does, however, fit in with the models of village and tribal economies that, as a group, are often called "gift economies". The key here perhaps is knowing that in any gift economy, the gift is recognized as coming with obligations that must be fulfilled. Often these obligations cannot be satisfied by direct payment back to the giver: they must be satisfied through some kind of gift to a recognized proxie. Such as the FOSS community as a whole.
Part of my reason for taking time to write these posts is because in stimulating these kinds of discussion on Slashdot I am discharging a small part of the obligations I owe to Linus and untold others for the wealth of software they have provided me.
A good summation. See also this AC comment,, which expands on the details of 'mutual selfishness', and my reply to that, which describes this kind of gift economy with something more than my original sound bite.
I hope parent post gets modded up. It is a good expansion on my very simplistic description of the FOSS gift economy.
- It does cost to share....- Sharing is often the right business move....
-
Gift economies are not simple; they rely on gift exchanges, and on concepts of debt, repayment, and conversions between different kinds of valuation that make the global financial markets look ridiculously simple. While Apache is great because lots of programmers have been contributing code to the effort, it is also great because lots of sys admins have been contributing their thoughts about how it could be improved, and lots of web designers have been contributing by marketing Apache to their clients. Bug reports have at least as much value as bug fixes. Input into design, suggestions for improved interfaces, and increasing the user base through evangelism are all important ways of contributing back to the community.
The FOSS gift economy is not based on altruism. It is one of those global village things. It is a recognition that if I make a little effort to enrich the lives of others today, my own life will be enriched in ways that I cannot predict, but which nevertheless are very real.
This quote from Ballmer that is posted on Groklaw under the section "[Update 2]", appears to be the Microsoft explanation:
Because our battle is not sort of business model to business model. Our battle is product to product, Windows versus Linux, Office versus OpenOffice.But he doesn't stop there. He immediately continues by directly contradicting himself, and talking about the differences in the FOSS and Microsoft business models:
The only other thing I would say that is probably germane is, we spend a lot of money, the rest of the commercial industry spends a lot of money on R & D. We've spent a lot of money licensing patents, when people come to us and say, "Hey, this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual propery, we'll either get a court judgment or we'll pay a big check. And we are going to -- I think it is important that the Open Source products also have an obligation to participate in the same way in the intellectual property regime.In other words, FOSS should be required to use the same wastefully expensive business model that Microsoft uses.
I don't think he gets FOSS. I am beginning to wonder if his commitment to the traditional corporate culture of 1982 is so great that he truly cannot see that FOSS is based on an entirely different cultural platform. FOSS is a kind of gift economy where those involved are saying "Hey, since it doesn't cost me to share what I'm doing, I'll gladly share it with everyone, and I expect others to give something back to all of us, too." Where traditional capitalist cultures like Ballmer's see product improvement as a way of getting a bigger slice of the pie, FOSS focuses on making the entire pie bigger so everyone gets a larger slice.
To those who are less culturally advanced, the clear successes of FOSS must seem to be magic. Apache, Blender, Firefox, and the others must all seem to have been created out of empty aether, and to be without any solid foundations. Clark's observation about advanced technology seemingly also applies to business models: if they are significantly advanced, their mechanisms of operation will seem to be magic to the businessmen of twenty-five years ago who haven't bothered to keep up.
Unless I'm mistaken (I know that its scary to contemplate that somebody posting on Slashdot might actually be wrong), you could put links to those messages that have the good links into your message. That would actually have saved some people from wading through the wasted discussions and provided credit where it is due. The result would look something like this link back to the parent post. But hopefully it would provide some useful content.
But this is Slashdot, where the simple technological solution is oft eschewed in favor of something with a few more convolutions...
I had to look up a few things to figure out what is wrong with parent post. The statement is in fact correct, but what constitutes an "admission" under law is limited.
In this instance, the person making the statement did so anonymously. In fact he has gone to some effort to assure that he cannot be associated with any of his assertions. So these assertions carry no more weight than any other hearsay. The anonymous gossiping of the crowd is excluded from the law, and this blogger is no more than a loud voice in a big, crowded public room.
The blogger's statements are hearsay because they are anonymous. I doubt that they meet all the other criteria of an "admission", but they certainly do not meet this one. Essent Healthcare cannot show that a crime has been committed based only on this hearsay. With no indication that there has been a crime, there is no basis for Essent's investigation of the blogger.
It also should be noted that violations of HIPAA regulations are federal offenses. If Essent Healthcare has a legitimate way of identifying that a criminal violation of HIPAA has occurred, they are obligated to report this to the feds, who will then do the investigation and prosecution.
For some things. Not for, say, face to face help in preparing a proposal to the bosses for converting the Advertising Department to Vista... which is the kind of support that Microsoft really likes to provide.
Doubtless there are other kinds of assistance that MS provides locally that are not available through Redmond. Especially wrt social networking and other kinds of "soft" support.
The phenomenon is called "dancing on the grave of the enemy". It has a very long history and it seems to be embedded in every culture. I think we've got to accept it as a part of our humanity.
That said, like any other dance, this one can be done with style and grace. Or with so much vulgarity that it can be painful to watch it. One can only hope that by the time the typical slashdotter graduates from high school, he will no longer be so very far to the left on the bell curve of socially acceptable expressiveness.
This is not easy stuff to learn, though. It is far easier to learn to show acceptance in defeat than to show graciousness in victory.
Will someone who understands bankruptcies explain to me how SCO's bankruptcy can continue when the financials they submitted are so clearly wrong?
A court on the East Coast has declared that SCO has been holding assets belonging to Novell.
SCO apparently is including those assets in its balance sheet, and only referring to the matter in the way an accountant would treat a minor unknown, like "Estimated Office Inventory Shrinkage, Current Quarter". However the theft involved is not minor; it probably exceeds the sum of SCO's reported profits over the last few years.
How can the Utah bankruptcy court accept the financial statements that SCO has submitted as valid? How can SCO get protected status if its application failed to meet the requirements?
This case strikes me as being like a pawn shop that has declared bankruptcy after being found guilty of fencing stolen property. The bankruptcy cannot go forward until an investigation to determine how much of its current inventory is stolen property is completed.
It seems to me that this is one of those instances where the bankruptcy cannot proceed until the amount of the theft has been determined. I would think that SCO's bankruptcy request should be denied or nullified, and SCO should be told it cannot submit one until it can accurately produce the required financial statements.
Is it any wonder that most of SCO's accounting staff have left? Being associated with the financials SCO provided the bankruptcy court would be a career stopper for an accountant.
Ecuadoran corporations that expect local support of the software they license from Microsoft may feel that this is a rather big thing. This isn't a "parking ticket" where Microsoft has to pay a fine. This is a "nobody is allowed to get in the building" show stopper.
CIOs of corporations in other countries now need to consider a new kind of risk as they decide whether to stay with the same vendor or explore other options. Part of choosing a software vendor has always involved assessing whether that vendor was likely to go out of business and leave your company orphaned, without support. From now on, it is also going to be necessary to assess whether the vendor is going to get shut down for illegal activities, and leave you without support.
Uh, thanks Microsoft for so poignantly demonstrating that this risk exists.
This means that for at least seven days, any Ecuadoran corporation that needs Microsoft support is SOL [Sh*t Outta Luck]. That might cause some ripples in the mining industry, for instance.
I don't see how this benefits the worldwide adoption of Vista or Office 2007. This is an entirely new avenue by which a corporate user of Microsoft products might find their operations temporarily "locally orphaned"— that is, without any local vendor support. I'm pretty sure that this event has not been received favorably in Redmond. I'm thinking that it is the kind of event that throws a chair when it bubbles up to the top.
Who would have guessed that when doing comparative risk assessments of OSs and office suites, one of the factors that now needs to be considered is whether the software vendor will comply with local laws?
Of course the QUID won't fly. At over 6 pounds, it is much too heavy for today's launch vehicles.
I'm telling you, the only sane space currency is one built on a bubble.
Think of these XOs as a very cheap way of distributing all the textbooks needed to take a child through the K-12 years.
After contemplating the cost of an XO vs. the cost of printing and shipping several hundred pounds of textbooks (and dry bookshelves to hold them all), it might be worthwhile to look at what can happen after K-12, through initiatives like MIT's OpenCourseWare.
True enough, but the statement really needs to be generalized:
XO isn't designed for sale, in any way. There is nothing proprietary about it. The software is all FOSS, and the hardware is basically patent-free. Under these conditions, there is no way for a would-be marketer to assure that his margins would be sufficient to recover his start-up costs.
The XO was designed through a very interesting process of contributed intellectual labor. There is literally no way to capitalize on that.
Just think, though. The XO will put the Gutenberg library of books into the hands of students for a fraction of the cost of buying and shipping the hardcopies of these classics.
Which basically translates to not for me for the average person, being neither a geek nor wanting to have the self-image of being 'basic'.
TFA's choice of words was unfortunate and inaccurate. It was especially bad since it is the kind of quick sound bite that cursory readers of TFA are going to take away with them.
Taken in context, what TFA was trying to say is that dweebs who have to have the very latest $500 pocket toy as a crutch for their low self-esteem should stick with Windows unless they are technically savvy.
And in the paragraphs before that sound bite, TFA did say that anyone who is not pocket toy dweeb will find that migrating to Linux is easier than re-installing their current Windows or migrating to Vista. And that finding, installing, and upgrading quality FOSS applications is a lot simpler and very much less expensive than the Windows way of doing these things.
Now how do you say all that in 25 words or less?
Thing is, it isn't, and never has been as good as photoshop, so the professional world aren't going to accept it while photoshop is better.
I keep coming back to this topic, because there is something important here that hasn't been said yet. Parent post is as good a place to hang this as any.
First, others have pointed out that TFA does not suggest that the Gimp has any kind of role in professional photography. Parent post should be modded to oblivion as it is way off topic. And it is attempting to drag a lot of the discussion away from the topic.
Now to my rant:
I am a hobby photographer. I got my first 35mm camera around 1967. I went digital in 2003. I went digital because I could afford Paint Shop Pro, and in it I saw the promise of being able to do all the neat things that could be done in the darkroom that I could never afford.
It didn't turn out quite as I expected. Software like PSP, Photoshop, or the Gimp is not a "digital darkroom" as I had thought. And all those techniques I had read about in wet photography magazines didn't apply. Ansel Adams has little to say about manipulating digital images: this is a different art form. The only thing wet photography and digital photography have in common is the use of a camera as the initial capture device.
Here's the thing: I'm not a terribly inspired photographer. That Muse doesn't speak to me. I take pictures that are usually technically adequate under good conditions, but the composition is flawed or there are background or foreground problems, or the conditions were not good and I lack the techniques to know how to manage difficult situations. The black labrador retriever in front of the black rock at dusk... if you take photos, you know what I'm talking about.
PSP or the Gimp let me work with these images and extract something that is consistently better than what came out of the camera, and sometimes rather good.
But the key here is realizing that this is a subtractive process. I am making my pictures better by selectively removing information. I am deliberately taking away chunks of reality. I am not a painter who treats the photograph as a canvas to which he adds stuff. I am a sculptor working with mallet and chisel to get the hell rid of the junk that doesn't belong in my picture.
There are probably tens of thousands more bits of information in a good wet photograph than any person can absorb. There are hundreds more bits in my poorest photographs than what I need to make the impression I want on the viewer. The Gimp is perfectly adequate at getting rid of the stuff that is in the way. Photoshop might offer a few more techniques, but I don't need to use those. I've got more than enough different techniques available to me.