Bill Gates isn't my enemy -- I don't (really) want to destroy him. Neither is Steve Ballmer.
<rant class="awful" title="Final Sanctimony Of 2006" style="presentation: preachy;">
Recognizing both of these guys as enemies is better than regarding them in any other way. Bill Gates' public history is littered with debris of the destruction he has caused to people who were his allies and partners: I would risk the safety of things I hold dear if I regarded him as anything other than an enemy. From statements in the public record, there is no doubt that if Steve Ballmer knew me personally, he would be threatening to "fucking kill" me.
Slashdot is full of people who want to emulate one or the other of these guys. They've got a word for people who see the world the way parent post describes it: suckers.
Enemies want to destroy each other.... I don't (really) want to destroy him.
Ah-hah! There is the problem; a simple but very basic mistake in how one should interpret reality.
It isn't about you all the time, you know. Do you really think that if you decided that Gretchen will be your lover, all of a sudden she will enthusiastically come to your bed? You actually have less say in who shall be your enemy than you do in who might become your lover. Failure to recognize that the other person has a lot to say about either relationship is not a good basis for one's view of the world.
No, Grasshopper, in this life you do not get to choose your enemies. You get to choose what principles will guide your behavior. You will then find that your enemies will choose you. If you are resourceful, careful, attentive, and very, very lucky, you may be able to choose your battles. But not your enemies; they will choose you.
Now enmity is another thing entirely. Avoid it, along with hatred, hostility, and all those associated feelings. Treat your enemies dispassionately, even in the midst of battle. For unless you are actually involved in hand to hand combat, there is no place for the intense concentration and focus, the tunnel vision and imperviousness to pain and injury, that are the hallmark of these emotions.
Invest your passionate energies in your friendships and loves; don't waste them on your enemies.
If you wanted better service, you'd just invest in either a better antenna, or a relationship with your neighbor so that they move the wireless router closer to you, or you'd spend money on the quality of service you require -- at a given cost.
Or he could invest in a can of Pringles potato chips and a few minutes of his time googling for directions on turning it into a decent antenna.
Basically grandparent post is all about ineptitude at thieving bandwidth. As with any other kind of thievery, the responsibility for quality and efficiency of operations lies completely with the thief. Ask Robin the Hood; he'd tell ya the same thing.
My willingness to trade this control for release from my responsibilities (for taking care of my stuff) only goes that far.
Well, you can keep your money under your mattress, but banks are generally safer, even though you have a lot less control over when you can make deposits and withdrawals, etc.
For me, I regard on-line mail services and "desktops" as soon becoming like my bank (they aren't there yet). I look forward to using Gmail as my primary email account, and letting Google protect my correspondence from fire, flood, and accidental reformats. And from identity thieves, which are really worrisome since I can't make it my full time job to keep up with their latest shenanigans.
I won't begin to rely on Google until they say they are ready: when the beta is over. And then I will evaluate their security measures and toolset before I commit. But I fully expect Google to be able to do a better job of security than I can reasonably do myself, and I expect them to offer a nice set of tools, including a way to archive old correspondence to a long term storage medium.
In the meantime, I am happily using Gmail for around 20% of my correspondence, and getting used to using multiple labels for organization rather than the mutually exclusive pigeonhole into different sub folders that is the best that Thunderbird currently offers.
I think HAL 9000, Colossus and Skynet are all eerily accurate depictions of the future of computing, each in its own way. The fact that all 3 movies seriously overestimated the rate of progress in technology...
Hmmm, are you sure that AI progress has fallen behind what "2001" predicted with HAL? Because I've been interacting with a number of entities on the internet where it sometimes seems like they might be silicon intelligences rather than flesh and blood. In fact there are some denizens of Slashdot that I'm sure would fail a Turing test, but they manage to pretty much blend in with the crowd here.
Yeah, I'm going for "funny", but think about it... maybe I'm going for "insightful", too.
This sort of topic has come up before, and the conclusion that should be drawn is the same -- this situation has little to do with technology, and a lot to do with lack of basic critical thinking skills.
So long as there is recognition that recent changes in technology (that intarweb thingy) have changed the "basic critical thinking skills", I would agree with this. But as phrased in parent post, this is an archaic formulation of the problem that denies the qualitative changes in these skills that technology has recently brought about.
Basic reading is still important. But the skills I was taught a few decades ago in finding WHAT to read— finding material on a particular subject and then assessing its level of authority and its probable accuracy— no longer have much relevance to the way I handle information.
Now I can find more material on any subject than I could absorb in a month with just a minute or two at the keyboard. I need to filter this huge heap of verbiage to find what is relevant-- and I need to do that with self-taught skills because those are the only ones any of us have for this task. The ability to refine a search to exclude all but the most relevant hits is not something that my teachers could have even imagined having to do in just a few minutes: back in the day it was something you did over a few weeks, with several trips to the library and piles of 3x5 bibliography cards. Doing this same thing in minutes is a skill that has yet to be codified and put in a textbook and made teachable. Yet there are quite a few of us who somehow do this on a daily basis; unfortunately we really do not yet know what we do, exactly— we don't even have a standard vocabulary for talking about the tasks involved.
And that is just one new literacy skill that we as a group are now acquiring. Another is the need to establish the credentials of those hits that we have magically determined to be relevant. This used to be matter of assessing the reputation of the publishing house, the degree to which the book or article has been accepted by its intended audience, and so on. But the intarweb changes that. It is not inconceivable that some Finn undergraduate might offer up on an obscure bulletin board a powerful new insight into operating system development; how do you credential something like that— how do you recognize its significance? OTOH, drivel is constantly making the rounds on MySpace and scoring high on Yahoo's "Most Frequently Emailed Articles" lists— how do you separate mere popularity from stuff that should be given some credence?
This problem of determining the authority or credentials of newly published material is further complicated by something entirely new, that never existed before the intarweb: we are now seeing published material that is without authority or credentials but which has an imperative quality that demands that we assess its accuracy. Such as warblogs from Baghdad, sightings of unusual fauna near the North Pole, zero day exploits that may have compromised national security agencies. Ten years ago these articles would never have seen much exposure; now they bubble up from no discernible roots to splash across the world stage in a matter of hours. Sometimes they require an immediate response: do we want to join the flash crowd? Do we want to fire off an email to a politician before the afternoon vote?
All this becomes further complicated because now the number of persons who write in english as a second language dwarfs the number of native english writers. For any meaningful communication to go forward, rules of grammar, spelling, and syntax are being relaxed. This is a Good Thing: every increase in communication is beneficial to the world, and english is strong enough to absorb these rapid changes without breaking. But it does mean that many of the internal cues we used to use to assess the quality and importance of a written document are no longer valid.
So to wrap up this rant: Yes, learning critical th
Are they trying to pull a Microsoft here - annoying the judge until he says something stupid and they can get him replaced? Or are they simply dumb and hard of hearing?
It seems that way, doesn't it?
SCO's legal team seems to be way out on a limb on this one. I can't help but wonder why any of them keep at it, when at this point it is going to be a highly publicized loss that will follow each of them for the rest of their careers. The usual behavior for lawyers in this situation is to tell the client that the case is lost, and focus on looking for new clients, but something seems to be overriding this normal response.
It makes me wonder if the legal team has something more important than their client's interests to protect. For instance, if there was a possibility that continuing this fiasco would lead to exposure of evidence implicating the lawyers themselves in a conspiracy with SCO and perhaps others to defraud the courts through pushing a frivolous suit... well, that would be criminal wouldn't it?
The SCO lawyers are fighting this thing as if their continued careers in law depended on it not going forward. And maybe that is the case.
You could abolish patents altoghether... and hence eliminate patent abuse.
To quote Eli Whitney: "Get your cotton picking hands off my gin!" And from that was born the US Patent Office.
More to the point: implementing that kind of monumental change would destroy the economy. So it isn't going to happen. There is no way that kind of thing would make it through Congress. Too many people and corporations have too much invested in the current patent system.
Imposing a Patent Oversight Board might work, since it might be possible to get companies like IBM to see the long term advantages. It is the first thing I've seen in this area that offers some potential for meaningful change.
Hmm, I don't see where you are proposing any fixes for the current flaws.
Basically you seem to be echoing the sentiments of the framers of the US Constitution: that there is no flawless way to set up a governance. Their solution was an inefficient, convoluted set of checks and balances that they hoped would be self-healing, and which is demonstrably full of serious flaws.
The Federal Reserve Board and the US Supreme Court work by insulating their members from political pressures and screening candidates very carefully. The POB could work the same way. We would need to put people of Greenspan's caliber onto it. We happen to have a few persons with decades of managing innovations that would find the challenges of an FOB position an interesting way to spend their time.
Just yelling that the current patent system is busted and needs to be replaced isn't going to do much good. What we need are workable suggestions for fixing or replacing it. And to be workable, any replacement has to be something that can be transitioned into without blowing the economy apart. This is not some kind of tinkertoy set that can be broken down into its constituent parts and put back together in some novel new way. This is a creaky old machine that has to keep working day after day while we find ways to renovate it as it chugs along.
A Patent Oversight Board is something that could be transitioned to without disrupting the economy. It would be a negative feedback control that could help guide innovative efforts while the economy and society change in response to the innovations. That is something that no rigid legislative solution could achieve. It is patently clear (pun intended) that Congress is incapable of writing law about intellectual property at a time when IP issues are causing such great changes in all aspects of society. A POB with limited controls could exert a lot of indirect influence, much as the Fed exerts a lot of indirect influence (lots of investment decisions are based on hints that the Fed might change its policies this way or that way-- the same kind of indirect influence would become the primary tool of a Patent Oversight Board).
It's the current implementation of the "profitable monopoly" that is causing issues.
There are bound to be these kinds of issues no matter what the implementation of patents is.
One problem with treating an idea as property is that unlike real propert such as a a farm, it's boundaries cannot be clearly drawn.
[later] Patents are an artifice.
Reading your post brings this idea to mind: What if we were to treat patents with a tool similar to that which we use to treat the other great artifice of our times: money? I'm thinking of a patent oversight board similar to the US Federal Reserve Board.
If length of patent life and degree of rigor in the qualifying process were adjustable at any time by an independent Patent Oversight Board, everything would change. There would be an immediate decrease in the number of "frivolous" patent applications from big corporations, since the act of applying for a patent on blue widgets might adversely affect the expected profits from their existing portfolio. Even before the POB issued its first decisions, the pharma and software industries would begin a process of self-regulation that could be steered toward a general increase in real innovation.
An example might make this clear: if the POB said that it was considering reducing the length of life of all patents by 6 months to control the volume of new patent applications, and would consider further downward reductions if this adjustment was insufficient, the big pharmas and software houses would definitely reduce the numbers of patents they apply for to protect the profits from their existing holdings. If the POB said that for the next 5 years patent applications on drugs and treatments for cystic fibrosis would be expedited by using a less rigorous qualifying process, that could well spur research into CF.
Why would a POB not work? The FRB works well enough for managing the economy of money; why not use the same technique to manage the economy of new ideas?
It's not illegal in the US. [referring to the disguised kickback scheme of HP bundling Windows on its computers]
Technically parent is correct; MS's licensing practices have not been fully tested in the courts as yet: they have not yet been proven illegal. But the practice of hidden bundling with kickback (in this case in the form of a steeply discounted licensing cost) almost certainly violates some of the existing regulations of interstate commerce. It is illegal for physicians to accept kickbacks from pharmaceutical houses for writing prescriptions, and new car dealers are required to openly list the cost of each accessory manufactured by a third party that has been added to the car. However in both cases it took decades for any effective regulations to be put in place. Things seem to be moving faster when it comes to abusive software licensing schemes (witness the action in France), so I think this the practice that MS and HP are engaged in will be studied by the courts in a few years.
It would be kind of neat if software licensing was brought fully under contract law and the licenses made unassignable (nontransferrable). That is, the licensing contract would have to be between the end user and the software house, with no middleman or third party agent involvement. In practice, this would mean that HP could install unlicensed copies of Windows on its boxes, but the user would have to directly contract with MS, including a direct payment to MS, to license and activate the copy. There is plenty of law and precedent for this kind of arrangement and there is no reason why software licensing contracts should continue to be treated any differently than contracts for real estate purchases or utility services.
Joe Vista user reading that explanation is going to quit half way through wondering wtf
I agree. This does not put forward the best arguments nor use the best methods of persuasion. It seems like a shock tactic.
That said, maybe this TFA is something I'd want to include in a selection of links I might email to the PHB that controls the purse strings where I work. It is NOT a sufficient argument of itself, but it might be a good supporting argument in a 3rd or 4th bullet point.
It certainly is stirring up the astroturfers and MS fanbois, so it does have some entertainment value in the here and now. Some of the posts I've seen so far are a hoot, and might be worth quoting to my PHB (who actually does have a pretty droll sense of humor-- he just doesn't know anything about technology and is unwilling in the last decade of his career to invest the time to learn).
I've read through parent post a couple of times, and I could find no compelling reason in it for upgrading from any existing version of Windows to Vista. Actually, I could not identify any reason at all to upgrade in that post.
So why would the author of parent be willing to spend money on Vista when he apparently already has a version of Windows that provides him with everything he wants? It seems like he has done a pretty good job of stating the case for not upgrading. It isn't as if his current version of Windows and the MS apps he runs on it are going to wear out, and he seems to be very happy with all that he has at the moment. It will be at least several years, and possibly forever, before game makers, etc, desert their current Windows markets to concentrate solely on Vista. If he moved to Vista right away, there is the distinct possibility that some of the games he now enjoys won't work as well when he tries to run them under the new OS.
Seems to me that there is at least one Windows fanboi who is strongly suggesting that Windows fanbois should stay with Win 2K or Win XP rather than jump to Vista.
A computer without an OS is not functional. An OS without a computer is not functional. It's a stupid law.
By that reasoning, since a new tire needs to be on a wheel to be functional, the HP Tire Co can require a customer to buy a wheel from them whenever he buys one of their tires. Even though the wheel was not made by them, and without regard to whether the lug pattern of the wheel that they provide will fit the axle of the vehicle the customer wants to put the tire on. Yeah, there is something stupid here, but I don't think it's the law that is stupid.
A prudent user keeps the original disks and software license certificates in a safe place, and of course also keeps a complete backup image of the system in an off site location. If his two week old HP computer is destroyed in a fire, he should be able to buy a brand new replacement without an OS, and load it from his original disks and backups. He should not have to pay MS twice for using one instance of their OS.
I know that HP gets a discount on the Windows licenses they buy from MS, and my understanding is that the size of that discount depends partly on how many they purchase but also partly on whether they agree to put a copy of Windows on every box they sell. This is a de facto kickback scheme, and a practice that appears to be illegal in France and is probably also illegal in the USA. It will probably be tested in the USA courts in a couple of years or so.
Make it sound like a bunch of children or something.
That would make reporting and editorializing about these matters extremely difficult, since the central figure around which all this stuff appears to revolve is a tantrum-prone, potty-mouthed, chair-throwing monkey-dancer.
Just now getting back to this. I don't usually respond to AC posts but evidently if they are modded up as "interesting", they'll hit my radar screen.
Mention has been made in parent of Advanced Power Management, Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, and Graphical Device Interface. These were introduced as specifications, which they are, and then described as standards, which they are not. In each case these were specifications developed by a couple of companies in a closed process where the companies saw a mutual market advantage in openly publishing them.
The marketing advantage was that of further differentiating the Intel / Windows environment from other computing platforms, so that developers who chose to write software for Windows would find insurmountable barriers to porting their work to other platforms. Not that it couldn't be done, but that doing so would be certain to require too expensive a rewrite to be economically worthwhile. The long range strategy was to starve competing platforms of developers (and do so in a way which looked very benign to any executive doing a superficial overview of the technology).
That Linux has been able to thrive under these conditions is testimony to the ingenuity and prowess of the Linux communities. The parent's description of "the Linux free-riders who benefit from the ACPI platform, without having contributed anything to it" couldn't be more wrong; Linux has managed to grow because a lot of hard work went into surmounting the limitations imposed by the ACPI and the other specifications that were intended to monkey-dance developers into the Windows corral (and were remarkably successful at doing so with commercial developers).
I think the basic problem with parent post is a conflation of "specification" with "standard". The two are very different, addressing entirely different levels of thinking. It is fair to say that when an industry standard has been put into place, it will drive the process of developing a specification (which in turn drives the development process). IOW, development is done until the elements of the specification are met; and the specification is written to meet the elements of the industry standard.
You know that Google does ban web sites that are obviously gaming their system. You know that you have set up your current clients so that sooner or later one or more of them will be banned. And now you have publicly stated that you purposefully put your clients in that kind of jeopardy.
Any potential client who googles "shane harter" before committing to you might stumble across these posts and recognize that paying you money for the risk of possibly becoming banned from Goople might not be the best way to go about getting a better Google rating.
Of course they might not see this particular thread: it is after all only one of 91,400 hits that Google finds for "shane harter"....
It could be worse, of course. It could be that someone from Google might come across your description of the customSiliconeBracelets.com web site (which I have just looked at-- it is as you describe "rich" with internal links) and arrange for it to be banned from their page ranking system right now. And inform the owner of the site why this has happened. So it could be worse; you could have just lost a customer, as well as putting one of your profit centers at risk of becoming a long term liability.
noun A particularly stupid way to shoot yourself in the foot with a viral advertising campaign gone bad. That advertising firm went bankrupt after the deanhunt it launched in December, 2006.
verb To publicly state that one is going to perpetrate a big advertising hoax and then attempt to initiate that hoax on slashdot or another forum known to be full of clever, investigative skeptics with lots of time on their hands. The advertising campaign might have been successful if its author hadn't deanhunted it on slashdot.
deanhunted, deanhunting adjective Referring to the state of self-destruction of credibility due to a particularly stupid deanhunt. The deanhunted advertising agency was never able to recover after the unfortunate series of events that it triggered in December 2006.
It looks like this is turning into a cautionary tale for would-be advertising gurus: just becoming widely known is not enough; you need to very much avoid becoming widely known as a laughingstock.
That it has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren't all moving in the same direction.
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
Superficially, both look messy.
Microsoft is a hierarchal structure in the process of disintegrating. Elements and components are breaking free of constraints external to them and moving away from each other.
Every successful FOSS project I am aware of is a self-organizing structure. More elements and components are coming together than are moving apart, and for the most part the motive forces bringing things together are internal within each element and component rather than imposed from without.
Agreed; it is in the best interests of all the participants, from multinational companies with revenues of billions to students who have yet to earn their first dollar, to keep the FOSS communities they are involved in free and open. And that's why FOSS is emerging as the dominant software development mode for the foreseeable future.
Consider just this aspect of the economics: it takes hundreds of programmers tens of thousands of hours to develop and improve the applications we use today. Microsoft uses the 20th century model of hiring these hundreds of programmers, at a large payroll expense. It also has big expenses in maintaining the hierarchal structures that keep each of its minions on task. Compare that to 21st century FOSS projects like OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox, or Apache. These projects have no payroll expenses and, since they are largely self-organizing, minimal structural expenses (which are gladly paid by the corporations like IBM and Redhat who benefit from the development efforts). The end products these communities create have no marginal cost (distributing 1 million copies of Firefox via the internet costs the Firefox project no more than distributing a hundred copies). The outcome of the competition between a FOSS product and any proprietary product that does the same thing is inevitable.
Microsoft's final efforts in preserving itself demonstrate this: MSIE v7 was not a product it wanted to produce but one that it had to produce to keep pace with Firefox; MS has been converted from being the market leader to playing catch-up with a freebie. Vista's penetration into the installed base of other Windows boxen is not assured and is definitely going to go forward slowly: nobody is forming lines at the sales counters. However the continued slow erosion of that same installed base of Windows users, who constitute Vista's core market, continues. Experienced individuals, private organizations, and government agencies are converting to Apple, BSD, or Linux for a variety of reasons, and there is no longer a huge reservoir of newbie computer users to sell to. Further, there are indications that this erosion is happening at an accelerating rate, even though people know that Microsoft is bringing out a new product that sucks less than Windows. Meanwhile back at Redmond, if Microsoft has a marketing strategy for converting Linux or Mac users back to Windows or Vista, it is keeping it a big secret. Which is a very strange way of doing any kind of marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates isn't my enemy -- I don't (really) want to destroy him. Neither is Steve Ballmer.
<rant class="awful" title="Final Sanctimony Of 2006" style="presentation: preachy;">
Recognizing both of these guys as enemies is better than regarding them in any other way. Bill Gates' public history is littered with debris of the destruction he has caused to people who were his allies and partners: I would risk the safety of things I hold dear if I regarded him as anything other than an enemy. From statements in the public record, there is no doubt that if Steve Ballmer knew me personally, he would be threatening to "fucking kill" me.
Slashdot is full of people who want to emulate one or the other of these guys. They've got a word for people who see the world the way parent post describes it: suckers.
Enemies want to destroy each other.... I don't (really) want to destroy him.
Ah-hah! There is the problem; a simple but very basic mistake in how one should interpret reality.
It isn't about you all the time, you know. Do you really think that if you decided that Gretchen will be your lover, all of a sudden she will enthusiastically come to your bed? You actually have less say in who shall be your enemy than you do in who might become your lover. Failure to recognize that the other person has a lot to say about either relationship is not a good basis for one's view of the world.
No, Grasshopper, in this life you do not get to choose your enemies. You get to choose what principles will guide your behavior. You will then find that your enemies will choose you. If you are resourceful, careful, attentive, and very, very lucky, you may be able to choose your battles. But not your enemies; they will choose you.
Now enmity is another thing entirely. Avoid it, along with hatred, hostility, and all those associated feelings. Treat your enemies dispassionately, even in the midst of battle. For unless you are actually involved in hand to hand combat, there is no place for the intense concentration and focus, the tunnel vision and imperviousness to pain and injury, that are the hallmark of these emotions.
Invest your passionate energies in your friendships and loves; don't waste them on your enemies.
</rant>
Desiderata
If you wanted better service, you'd just invest in either a better antenna, or a relationship with your neighbor so that they move the wireless router closer to you, or you'd spend money on the quality of service you require -- at a given cost.
Or he could invest in a can of Pringles potato chips and a few minutes of his time googling for directions on turning it into a decent antenna.
Basically grandparent post is all about ineptitude at thieving bandwidth. As with any other kind of thievery, the responsibility for quality and efficiency of operations lies completely with the thief. Ask Robin the Hood; he'd tell ya the same thing.
My willingness to trade this control for release from my responsibilities (for taking care of my stuff) only goes that far.
Well, you can keep your money under your mattress, but banks are generally safer, even though you have a lot less control over when you can make deposits and withdrawals, etc.
For me, I regard on-line mail services and "desktops" as soon becoming like my bank (they aren't there yet). I look forward to using Gmail as my primary email account, and letting Google protect my correspondence from fire, flood, and accidental reformats. And from identity thieves, which are really worrisome since I can't make it my full time job to keep up with their latest shenanigans.
I won't begin to rely on Google until they say they are ready: when the beta is over. And then I will evaluate their security measures and toolset before I commit. But I fully expect Google to be able to do a better job of security than I can reasonably do myself, and I expect them to offer a nice set of tools, including a way to archive old correspondence to a long term storage medium.
In the meantime, I am happily using Gmail for around 20% of my correspondence, and getting used to using multiple labels for organization rather than the mutually exclusive pigeonhole into different sub folders that is the best that Thunderbird currently offers.
The fact is, noone really knows how to make a computer think, and that's that.
That's what the botnets want you to think...
I think HAL 9000, Colossus and Skynet are all eerily accurate depictions of the future of computing, each in its own way. The fact that all 3 movies seriously overestimated the rate of progress in technology...
Hmmm, are you sure that AI progress has fallen behind what "2001" predicted with HAL? Because I've been interacting with a number of entities on the internet where it sometimes seems like they might be silicon intelligences rather than flesh and blood. In fact there are some denizens of Slashdot that I'm sure would fail a Turing test, but they manage to pretty much blend in with the crowd here.
Yeah, I'm going for "funny", but think about it... maybe I'm going for "insightful", too.
This sort of topic has come up before, and the conclusion that should be drawn is the same -- this situation has little to do with technology, and a lot to do with lack of basic critical thinking skills.
So long as there is recognition that recent changes in technology (that intarweb thingy) have changed the "basic critical thinking skills", I would agree with this. But as phrased in parent post, this is an archaic formulation of the problem that denies the qualitative changes in these skills that technology has recently brought about.
Basic reading is still important. But the skills I was taught a few decades ago in finding WHAT to read— finding material on a particular subject and then assessing its level of authority and its probable accuracy— no longer have much relevance to the way I handle information.
Now I can find more material on any subject than I could absorb in a month with just a minute or two at the keyboard. I need to filter this huge heap of verbiage to find what is relevant-- and I need to do that with self-taught skills because those are the only ones any of us have for this task. The ability to refine a search to exclude all but the most relevant hits is not something that my teachers could have even imagined having to do in just a few minutes: back in the day it was something you did over a few weeks, with several trips to the library and piles of 3x5 bibliography cards. Doing this same thing in minutes is a skill that has yet to be codified and put in a textbook and made teachable. Yet there are quite a few of us who somehow do this on a daily basis; unfortunately we really do not yet know what we do, exactly— we don't even have a standard vocabulary for talking about the tasks involved.
And that is just one new literacy skill that we as a group are now acquiring. Another is the need to establish the credentials of those hits that we have magically determined to be relevant. This used to be matter of assessing the reputation of the publishing house, the degree to which the book or article has been accepted by its intended audience, and so on. But the intarweb changes that. It is not inconceivable that some Finn undergraduate might offer up on an obscure bulletin board a powerful new insight into operating system development; how do you credential something like that— how do you recognize its significance? OTOH, drivel is constantly making the rounds on MySpace and scoring high on Yahoo's "Most Frequently Emailed Articles" lists— how do you separate mere popularity from stuff that should be given some credence?
This problem of determining the authority or credentials of newly published material is further complicated by something entirely new, that never existed before the intarweb: we are now seeing published material that is without authority or credentials but which has an imperative quality that demands that we assess its accuracy. Such as warblogs from Baghdad, sightings of unusual fauna near the North Pole, zero day exploits that may have compromised national security agencies. Ten years ago these articles would never have seen much exposure; now they bubble up from no discernible roots to splash across the world stage in a matter of hours. Sometimes they require an immediate response: do we want to join the flash crowd? Do we want to fire off an email to a politician before the afternoon vote?
All this becomes further complicated because now the number of persons who write in english as a second language dwarfs the number of native english writers. For any meaningful communication to go forward, rules of grammar, spelling, and syntax are being relaxed. This is a Good Thing: every increase in communication is beneficial to the world, and english is strong enough to absorb these rapid changes without breaking. But it does mean that many of the internal cues we used to use to assess the quality and importance of a written document are no longer valid.
So to wrap up this rant: Yes, learning critical th
I just checked with several variations. The most successful was
"find his way out of a paper bag" instructions
Basically there's lots of info about paper bags and what goes into them and crafty little things you can do with them.
But there is no way to google yourself out of a paper bag. Can't be done.
<!--Kim was here:
{} -->
I noticed the Kim comment, too. So who is this person? Somebody at NYT, or with Bush&Co, or a CIA agent??
There is a story within a story here, and I for one would like to hear it!
Are they trying to pull a Microsoft here - annoying the judge until he says something stupid and they can get him replaced? Or are they simply dumb and hard of hearing?
It seems that way, doesn't it?
SCO's legal team seems to be way out on a limb on this one. I can't help but wonder why any of them keep at it, when at this point it is going to be a highly publicized loss that will follow each of them for the rest of their careers. The usual behavior for lawyers in this situation is to tell the client that the case is lost, and focus on looking for new clients, but something seems to be overriding this normal response.
It makes me wonder if the legal team has something more important than their client's interests to protect. For instance, if there was a possibility that continuing this fiasco would lead to exposure of evidence implicating the lawyers themselves in a conspiracy with SCO and perhaps others to defraud the courts through pushing a frivolous suit... well, that would be criminal wouldn't it?
The SCO lawyers are fighting this thing as if their continued careers in law depended on it not going forward. And maybe that is the case.
You could abolish patents altoghether... and hence eliminate patent abuse.
To quote Eli Whitney: "Get your cotton picking hands off my gin!" And from that was born the US Patent Office.
More to the point: implementing that kind of monumental change would destroy the economy. So it isn't going to happen. There is no way that kind of thing would make it through Congress. Too many people and corporations have too much invested in the current patent system.
Imposing a Patent Oversight Board might work, since it might be possible to get companies like IBM to see the long term advantages. It is the first thing I've seen in this area that offers some potential for meaningful change.
Hmm, I don't see where you are proposing any fixes for the current flaws.
Basically you seem to be echoing the sentiments of the framers of the US Constitution: that there is no flawless way to set up a governance. Their solution was an inefficient, convoluted set of checks and balances that they hoped would be self-healing, and which is demonstrably full of serious flaws.
So what do you propose?
The Federal Reserve Board and the US Supreme Court work by insulating their members from political pressures and screening candidates very carefully. The POB could work the same way. We would need to put people of Greenspan's caliber onto it. We happen to have a few persons with decades of managing innovations that would find the challenges of an FOB position an interesting way to spend their time.
Just yelling that the current patent system is busted and needs to be replaced isn't going to do much good. What we need are workable suggestions for fixing or replacing it. And to be workable, any replacement has to be something that can be transitioned into without blowing the economy apart. This is not some kind of tinkertoy set that can be broken down into its constituent parts and put back together in some novel new way. This is a creaky old machine that has to keep working day after day while we find ways to renovate it as it chugs along.
A Patent Oversight Board is something that could be transitioned to without disrupting the economy. It would be a negative feedback control that could help guide innovative efforts while the economy and society change in response to the innovations. That is something that no rigid legislative solution could achieve. It is patently clear (pun intended) that Congress is incapable of writing law about intellectual property at a time when IP issues are causing such great changes in all aspects of society. A POB with limited controls could exert a lot of indirect influence, much as the Fed exerts a lot of indirect influence (lots of investment decisions are based on hints that the Fed might change its policies this way or that way-- the same kind of indirect influence would become the primary tool of a Patent Oversight Board).
Reading your post brings this idea to mind: What if we were to treat patents with a tool similar to that which we use to treat the other great artifice of our times: money? I'm thinking of a patent oversight board similar to the US Federal Reserve Board.
If length of patent life and degree of rigor in the qualifying process were adjustable at any time by an independent Patent Oversight Board, everything would change. There would be an immediate decrease in the number of "frivolous" patent applications from big corporations, since the act of applying for a patent on blue widgets might adversely affect the expected profits from their existing portfolio. Even before the POB issued its first decisions, the pharma and software industries would begin a process of self-regulation that could be steered toward a general increase in real innovation.
An example might make this clear: if the POB said that it was considering reducing the length of life of all patents by 6 months to control the volume of new patent applications, and would consider further downward reductions if this adjustment was insufficient, the big pharmas and software houses would definitely reduce the numbers of patents they apply for to protect the profits from their existing holdings. If the POB said that for the next 5 years patent applications on drugs and treatments for cystic fibrosis would be expedited by using a less rigorous qualifying process, that could well spur research into CF.
Why would a POB not work? The FRB works well enough for managing the economy of money; why not use the same technique to manage the economy of new ideas?
It's not illegal in the US. [referring to the disguised kickback scheme of HP bundling Windows on its computers]
Technically parent is correct; MS's licensing practices have not been fully tested in the courts as yet: they have not yet been proven illegal. But the practice of hidden bundling with kickback (in this case in the form of a steeply discounted licensing cost) almost certainly violates some of the existing regulations of interstate commerce. It is illegal for physicians to accept kickbacks from pharmaceutical houses for writing prescriptions, and new car dealers are required to openly list the cost of each accessory manufactured by a third party that has been added to the car. However in both cases it took decades for any effective regulations to be put in place. Things seem to be moving faster when it comes to abusive software licensing schemes (witness the action in France), so I think this the practice that MS and HP are engaged in will be studied by the courts in a few years.
It would be kind of neat if software licensing was brought fully under contract law and the licenses made unassignable (nontransferrable). That is, the licensing contract would have to be between the end user and the software house, with no middleman or third party agent involvement. In practice, this would mean that HP could install unlicensed copies of Windows on its boxes, but the user would have to directly contract with MS, including a direct payment to MS, to license and activate the copy. There is plenty of law and precedent for this kind of arrangement and there is no reason why software licensing contracts should continue to be treated any differently than contracts for real estate purchases or utility services.
gNewSense (which sounds a /lot/ like gNuisance)
Good catch! Hopefully this will be seen by the right people and corrected.
One that requires 35GB of HD space to create and install?
Wow. Is that really correct?
Joe Vista user reading that explanation is going to quit half way through wondering wtf
I agree. This does not put forward the best arguments nor use the best methods of persuasion. It seems like a shock tactic.
That said, maybe this TFA is something I'd want to include in a selection of links I might email to the PHB that controls the purse strings where I work. It is NOT a sufficient argument of itself, but it might be a good supporting argument in a 3rd or 4th bullet point.
It certainly is stirring up the astroturfers and MS fanbois, so it does have some entertainment value in the here and now. Some of the posts I've seen so far are a hoot, and might be worth quoting to my PHB (who actually does have a pretty droll sense of humor-- he just doesn't know anything about technology and is unwilling in the last decade of his career to invest the time to learn).
I've read through parent post a couple of times, and I could find no compelling reason in it for upgrading from any existing version of Windows to Vista. Actually, I could not identify any reason at all to upgrade in that post.
So why would the author of parent be willing to spend money on Vista when he apparently already has a version of Windows that provides him with everything he wants? It seems like he has done a pretty good job of stating the case for not upgrading. It isn't as if his current version of Windows and the MS apps he runs on it are going to wear out, and he seems to be very happy with all that he has at the moment. It will be at least several years, and possibly forever, before game makers, etc, desert their current Windows markets to concentrate solely on Vista. If he moved to Vista right away, there is the distinct possibility that some of the games he now enjoys won't work as well when he tries to run them under the new OS.
Seems to me that there is at least one Windows fanboi who is strongly suggesting that Windows fanbois should stay with Win 2K or Win XP rather than jump to Vista.
Am I missing something here?
A computer without an OS is not functional. An OS without a computer is not functional. It's a stupid law.
By that reasoning, since a new tire needs to be on a wheel to be functional, the HP Tire Co can require a customer to buy a wheel from them whenever he buys one of their tires. Even though the wheel was not made by them, and without regard to whether the lug pattern of the wheel that they provide will fit the axle of the vehicle the customer wants to put the tire on. Yeah, there is something stupid here, but I don't think it's the law that is stupid.
A prudent user keeps the original disks and software license certificates in a safe place, and of course also keeps a complete backup image of the system in an off site location. If his two week old HP computer is destroyed in a fire, he should be able to buy a brand new replacement without an OS, and load it from his original disks and backups. He should not have to pay MS twice for using one instance of their OS.
I know that HP gets a discount on the Windows licenses they buy from MS, and my understanding is that the size of that discount depends partly on how many they purchase but also partly on whether they agree to put a copy of Windows on every box they sell. This is a de facto kickback scheme, and a practice that appears to be illegal in France and is probably also illegal in the USA. It will probably be tested in the USA courts in a couple of years or so.
Make it sound like a bunch of children or something.
That would make reporting and editorializing about these matters extremely difficult, since the central figure around which all this stuff appears to revolve is a tantrum-prone, potty-mouthed, chair-throwing monkey-dancer.
I wish I had a firefox plugin that would hold my post until it could be posted.
I've found FoxNotes satisfactory for that kind of thing.
Just now getting back to this. I don't usually respond to AC posts but evidently if they are modded up as "interesting", they'll hit my radar screen.
Mention has been made in parent of Advanced Power Management, Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, and Graphical Device Interface. These were introduced as specifications, which they are, and then described as standards, which they are not. In each case these were specifications developed by a couple of companies in a closed process where the companies saw a mutual market advantage in openly publishing them.
The marketing advantage was that of further differentiating the Intel / Windows environment from other computing platforms, so that developers who chose to write software for Windows would find insurmountable barriers to porting their work to other platforms. Not that it couldn't be done, but that doing so would be certain to require too expensive a rewrite to be economically worthwhile. The long range strategy was to starve competing platforms of developers (and do so in a way which looked very benign to any executive doing a superficial overview of the technology).
That Linux has been able to thrive under these conditions is testimony to the ingenuity and prowess of the Linux communities. The parent's description of "the Linux free-riders who benefit from the ACPI platform, without having contributed anything to it" couldn't be more wrong; Linux has managed to grow because a lot of hard work went into surmounting the limitations imposed by the ACPI and the other specifications that were intended to monkey-dance developers into the Windows corral (and were remarkably successful at doing so with commercial developers).
I think the basic problem with parent post is a conflation of "specification" with "standard". The two are very different, addressing entirely different levels of thinking. It is fair to say that when an industry standard has been put into place, it will drive the process of developing a specification (which in turn drives the development process). IOW, development is done until the elements of the specification are met; and the specification is written to meet the elements of the industry standard.
You should have kept it a secret.
You know that Google does ban web sites that are obviously gaming their system. You know that you have set up your current clients so that sooner or later one or more of them will be banned. And now you have publicly stated that you purposefully put your clients in that kind of jeopardy.
Any potential client who googles "shane harter" before committing to you might stumble across these posts and recognize that paying you money for the risk of possibly becoming banned from Goople might not be the best way to go about getting a better Google rating.
Of course they might not see this particular thread: it is after all only one of 91,400 hits that Google finds for "shane harter"....
It could be worse, of course. It could be that someone from Google might come across your description of the customSiliconeBracelets.com web site (which I have just looked at-- it is as you describe "rich" with internal links) and arrange for it to be banned from their page ranking system right now. And inform the owner of the site why this has happened. So it could be worse; you could have just lost a customer, as well as putting one of your profit centers at risk of becoming a long term liability.
An entry for wicktionary:
deanhunt
It looks like this is turning into a cautionary tale for would-be advertising gurus: just becoming widely known is not enough; you need to very much avoid becoming widely known as a laughingstock.
Superficially, both look messy.
Microsoft is a hierarchal structure in the process of disintegrating. Elements and components are breaking free of constraints external to them and moving away from each other.
Every successful FOSS project I am aware of is a self-organizing structure. More elements and components are coming together than are moving apart, and for the most part the motive forces bringing things together are internal within each element and component rather than imposed from without.
Does that help show the differences?
Agreed; it is in the best interests of all the participants, from multinational companies with revenues of billions to students who have yet to earn their first dollar, to keep the FOSS communities they are involved in free and open. And that's why FOSS is emerging as the dominant software development mode for the foreseeable future.
Consider just this aspect of the economics: it takes hundreds of programmers tens of thousands of hours to develop and improve the applications we use today. Microsoft uses the 20th century model of hiring these hundreds of programmers, at a large payroll expense. It also has big expenses in maintaining the hierarchal structures that keep each of its minions on task. Compare that to 21st century FOSS projects like OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox, or Apache. These projects have no payroll expenses and, since they are largely self-organizing, minimal structural expenses (which are gladly paid by the corporations like IBM and Redhat who benefit from the development efforts). The end products these communities create have no marginal cost (distributing 1 million copies of Firefox via the internet costs the Firefox project no more than distributing a hundred copies). The outcome of the competition between a FOSS product and any proprietary product that does the same thing is inevitable.
Microsoft's final efforts in preserving itself demonstrate this: MSIE v7 was not a product it wanted to produce but one that it had to produce to keep pace with Firefox; MS has been converted from being the market leader to playing catch-up with a freebie. Vista's penetration into the installed base of other Windows boxen is not assured and is definitely going to go forward slowly: nobody is forming lines at the sales counters. However the continued slow erosion of that same installed base of Windows users, who constitute Vista's core market, continues. Experienced individuals, private organizations, and government agencies are converting to Apple, BSD, or Linux for a variety of reasons, and there is no longer a huge reservoir of newbie computer users to sell to. Further, there are indications that this erosion is happening at an accelerating rate, even though people know that Microsoft is bringing out a new product that sucks less than Windows. Meanwhile back at Redmond, if Microsoft has a marketing strategy for converting Linux or Mac users back to Windows or Vista, it is keeping it a big secret. Which is a very strange way of doing any kind of marketing.