Read the penalties section of the bill. Its life imprisonment for people who attempt to cause death through hacking. That is, if I hack into a control tower and try to make planes crash, I might be sentenced to life in prison.
Currently, that would be a weak case of attempted murder. We have crimes in the country that say "If you commit a crime, there's a penalty. If you commit a crime with a weapon, thats a more serious penalty." Well, when using computers as a weapon, its a weapon.
I fully agree with this. And I also mostly agree with those that say much of this law is redundant. I'll explain:
Case law, that which is built on precedent, undoubtedly would get around to modifying all the existing laws that recent IT advances have impacted. But that process is slow, meandering, and patchwork. It is slow because given the choice between arguing a test case of some new notion of law or getting an easy conviction based on a more conservative approach, a prosecutor best serves the people by going with the easy approach. Courts do make the law-- but they work really hard at doing so as little as possible. Second point: the case law approach to this will meander-- there is no way of saying what sections of the law will be clarified first. That will be depend on what the criminals do. One implication of this is that relying on case law in this area will guarantee the creation of loopholes. Third point: this is also a patchwork approach since case law applies by jurisdiction. What becomes binding in New England may have no impact in the Pacific Northwest.
A result: it is impossible to develop any kind of reasoned security structures during the years of legal chaos as precedents are established and challenged.
Legislative law gets around all that. Even the most obvious redundancies in this bill have value, because the entirety goes into effect at once. Across all the Federal jurisdictions. And this will make it possible for agencies and programmers to legally develop the means to protect what needs to be protected, working from an established set of criteria about what is legal for them to do and what is out of bounds. Legislation like this is a necessary prerequisite to any kind of reasonable design of security systems.
Chances are that this will be a law of short term effect-- there may not be many prosecutions under it and in ten years it may have no particular value at all. But not all laws should be judged on their eternal value-- some, like this one, are uniquely suited to addressing a short term problem in an efficient way.
I think this bill is probably A Good Thing. I support it, though I recognize that in five years or so I might find myself fighting to repeal some part of it. But that is tomorrow's battle, and it may not even come about.
Shooting hollow beebees full of water-ice at some multiple of escape velocity
Effective range: on the order of 1 Earth diameter (limited by accuracy aiming mechanism)
Solar powered
Using banks of capicitors extracted by/.ers from discarded disposable cameras
on-board robotics with Forth and Legos (well, maybe Legos only for the early prototypes)
strategic AI via earthbased voluntary distributed computing system (or a beowulf cluster of US Government excessed 486 boxen)
knock the junk
into decaying orbits or
a designated "trash ring" or
push it to escape velocity
depending on specifics of each piece of junk
Funding partially by corporate sponsorship ("Legos in orbit")
Funny as it sounds, this could work. A proactive strategy would be based on using single hits over multiple targeting windows to push each piece of junk into decaying orbits or to shepherd junk into a trash ring where our grandkids could mine it (what will be the multiplier for the value of a chunk of scrap metal that is already at orbital velocity?). Beebees that miss would add an insignificant amount of water vapor to the upper atmosphere or leave near Earth space. Each shot would cost no more than the cost of the beebee-- the power is free. Someone could figure out the ratio of the size of the solar array to the number of shots that can be fired in month's time. My wag is that with collectors comparable with today's, the thing could manage a few shots a week.
A program like this would need a good name. I suggest "Space Balls"
I can think of a few business models that a (let's use a stereotype here) young, unemployed, semi-literate mother in an isolated village in India could develop around the Simputer and net access.
Village scribe and postmistress
Messages and images between relatives, friends, and trade contacts in surrounding villages. (or elsewhere, of course)
Researcher
Finding repair parts for the local mechanic-- gathering info for a farmer about what other farmers in the region are going to plant next season-- getting price and cost data for diffferent market towns so a craftsman can decide where to peddle his goods
Scheduler
Arranging appointments for villagers at distant locations
Business broker
Setting up trade meetings-- "meet me at the crossroad tomorrow". Brokering crop futures deals. Managing pre-market bidding of craft wares.
There are programs in place that would provide this young woman with low cost loans to cover her start-up expenses. The Indian government has found that supporting new village entrepreuners and their micro businesses has had demonstrable effects in increasing literacy, decreasing migration of poor to the cities, and decreasing the birthrate (!).
I think the Simputer fits very well into this larger scheme.
His paper is valuable, priceless even, in that it is throwing a spotlight on a part of the Open Source phenomenon that has not yet come into public discussion.
While I don't know COCOMO, I accept that his numbers are highly suspect. But you have provided a range of accuracy that corrects for this. I am very confident that any reasonable assessment of the Linux development effort is going to be greater than $100 million and less than $10 billion.
So it is indisputable that Linux is a resource whose development effort exceeds $100 million.
And no reasonable person can question that this resource is now available at very low cost to anyone or any institution, on a global level.
It is difficult to see how anyone could not recognize that the use of this resource increases global wealth. Linux does make the world pie bigger.
I think that is the real story here. Linux is a tool, a lever, that has required at least $100 million of effort to develop, but which anyone can put to work for extremely low cost. I think this kind of phrasing needs to be brought to the attention of those who are being FUDded by groups that feel threatened by Open Source.
The creator of a product has the moral right to offer his product under whatever terms he wishes. If a potential consumer of that product decides that he does not like those terms, he is free to choose not to use the product in question.
While, if you allow a very vague definition of "moral right", that is sort of true of products offered for sale in the marketplace and other situations where a customer is entering into a contract with a producer, it does not apply to a situation where the producer is required for safety or useability reasons to correct a deficiency in a product or service that has already been contracted for.
On the hardware side, the equivalent to MS putting this EULA on this security patch would be Ford requiring that you agree to replace all your tires with the brand they specify as part of their recall to repair defective seatbelt latches.
On the service side, it is equivalent to a paint contractor saying that they will only fix the bad job they did on the outside of your house if you agree to let them do all your interior painting, too.
It looks to me like Microsoft just wants to stay in court. This is going to guarantee that their legal department will continue to have plenty to do.
and, lol, I'd like to see a court's opinion on the degree to which this unilateral ammendment to the original licensing agreement voids the original license-- there is a distant possibility that anyone who upgrades their MS Multimedia under this provision becomes effectively immune to any charges of violation of other Microsoft EULAs.
--
iI don't care whether you can think outside of the box. Can you think outside of the cliche?
Gee, I guess it's a matter of what you consider trivial.
Mars is kind of interesting. There is only one of it, and it stands out well against the black backdrop of space. In the altogether, Mars is pretty unique.
Now don't take this personally, but you are only as unique as 6 billion other people. And you pretty much blend in with the crowd.
There are 6 billion stories on the blue marble. Yours is but one of them.
I think it's useful to keep a proper perspective about such things. If the human experience was about important stuff, then, heck, with 6 billion variations of the basic theme running around, I think we can pretty much say that no matter how you want to go at measuring it, everything important about being human has been done. A lot of times.
But learning new stuff about Mars is entertaining, like a walk through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, or listening to Classical Gas, or seeing a Lucas film. This type of experience can twist my life into a new shape. Maybe a minor twist, or maybe a total change. The only thing I can count on when I have an "art" experience is that I'll be changed in some unexpected way by it. So even though this is a "trivial" experience that hasn't added dollars to my bank account, finding out there was once a big swimming hole on Mars adds something priceless to my imaginations and my life.
Importance is, apparently, something you measure. A way to quantify your life. But when you have counted all the grains of sand and measured all the values of your life down to the the last cent, you've got one row of numbers that really doesn't seem all that significant among the 6 billion other rows. I'd rather look at my life's value in a different way.
So I see the effort we put into learning about Mars as similar to the engineering effort and cost that goes into a Star Wars movie, and I expect the same kind of return on investment: some unexpected change, maybe minor, maybe not. I think our explorations of space are one of the new art forms of our times.
I can accept the round-off of 4840 sqRI = 1 STU. Even though the base linear Rhode Island unit is demonstrably not only imaginary but also inconceivable (it ain't even an island ferkriesache!)
But ya gotta realize that 3 microTexi = 1 standard sandbox (SSB).
So does anybody know how many skoshes in a nanoTexas?
And another thing (to bring this back on target): is it really appropriate to apply units of dry area to Martian wetlands?
[the boss] quotes a development time of 2 weeks to a client, but because of the scale and complexity of the aplication we're building, that turns into 2 months. Needless to say, clients aren't happy...
But they are your clients. You and the other tech aren't sitting around tweaking your configurations while waiting for The Next Paying Contract to come in. If your boss was more realistic in his timeline assessments, would he be putting your company at a competitive disadvantage? Is he actually doing some shrewd Yankee Trader assessments about the prospect's level of plausible fantasy and his toleration for disappointments with slipping deadlines? If your company is getting a reasonable amount of repeat business, maybe your boss is doing a pretty good job in his own field. There are an awful lot of industries where its carnie against carnie, and if your tech work is a part of one of those, then you really do want PT Barnum in your boss' role.
I think, though, that we've moved away from project management into a sidebar about the interface between technicians and salespeople.
Ideally, project management would accept input from both sales and technical, and develop a strategy that you might be squeamish about, but that didn't actually cause you to hurl. That might mean be willing to keep your mouth shut about obvious gaps between what is promised and what is realistic-- but if you are in one of the intrinsically dirty businesses, then you should be willing to take some of the tarnish.
Useful new buzzword...
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...this "version fatigue". I hope it gets as widely adopted as "vaporware" did. Version fatigue is an excellent way to describe that part of so many new releases of older products that are nothing more than moving the chrome around on the sheet metal, and have nothing to do with the underlying chassis and powertrain.
Sometimes one pithy identification of a problem is enough to cause radical changes for the better. Version fatigue might be a very powerful addition to the lexicon.
"...a recruiter contacted me with a very nice potential position - I interviewed... decided I was interested... [I was] extended a counter-offer with a matching salary, thereby eliminating my only reason for considering the other job...."
The arguments for refusing a counter-offer are strong. But they may not apply in your situation, where a recruiter found you rather than you actively looking for another job.
How much effort did you put into the interview process with the other company? Was it a lark? Something to do with an empty weekend? Make some assessment of how much you cared whether you would get an offer. If you cared a great deal, then chances are you should take the offer. To do otherwise is to be second-guessing yourself.
Look at the other side of this, too. What is your current employer's policy on job reviews? If your manager merely pushed your annual review forward by 6 weeks and was able to use your job offer as a justification for doing something he thinks is good for the business (such as retaining a valuable employee), then the problems with staying on are going to be relatively minor.
If you do decide to stay on, you and your manager should work out what changes in your responsibilities go along with the increase in pay. There needs to be such a change. It does not need to involve an increase in your daily workload (at least at first): formal recognition of something that you've already taken on in an informal way would be excellent. Or it could be something like the role of technical advisor to policy decisions. But there needs to be something that clearly shows that your raise is related to your future contributions to the company, and that the outside job offer did no more than spur along a process that was moseying toward increasing your responsibilities anyway.
If management balks at this job redefinition, then it is certainly time to move on.
Sir, I take issue with you saying that WaSP obey standards. WaSP historically have always been syntactically compliant; passing through validator.w3.org without issue, but time and time again they have abused the usage of w3c xhtml/html as per the spec.
You've expanded the subject of discussion from a relatively narrow focus on one web page to a much more global condemnation. I can't say I'm terribly interested in going along with this. But I suppose I can spare you my afternoon coffeebreak. So let's get on with then...
<snippage> I present exhibit 2, their default font size as mentioned in this very thread. Obeying standards - by definition - means coding to them - and not diverting from the standards to cope with implementation issues. Here WaSP use a smaller font-size than regular - when 'font-size:regular' is intended to be used for the body of the document. No syntax was broken - only standards.
Ah, replying to you isn't going to take much time a all!
Let me point out to those who aren't familiar with CSS that "regular" is not one of the allowed values for font-size property. There is no such thing. A forgiving user-agent will ignore this declaration, but there may be some that will give an error message and refuse to display the page.
IMO, there is no point in conducting discussions about standards with persons who lack a fundamental understanding of the area the standards govern, or who are too sloppy in their work to cross-check critical details in their arguments. Come back again when you are better prepared to talk about the subject. I expect, though, that in your preparations you will discover that there is a big difference between a codified standard and any of the myriad of (often conflicting) rationales that came into play during its discussion.
Just for the record, the WaSP style sheet uses
body { font-size: small }
, which sets the font relative to the user-agent's default. This is generally considered to be good practice by those concerned with browser ergonomics.
...Oh, yeah, it may abide by all the standards. But, they don't abide by the spirit of the standards on their front page. The spirit of the standards is to keep the web accessible to everybody regardless of their choice of browser, so long as those browsers are also standards compliant.
I've got that page open in the second tab of Moz as I write this. It is liquid from any browser width down to 410 px. Below that, it degrades acceptably (remains readable) until the columns are just a single word wide, well below the limit of reason. All text responds to user-agent changes in the font size, and the layout reflows without problems. I've looked at their stylesheet and it looks good (wsp/css).
There is no may about it; this page does "abide by all the standards."
Does it also abide by the spirit of the standards?
Yes. The standards are not intended to lock you into any design style. There is no "best" design style. The standards were developed to assure that material written to the standard will be presented to the reader no matter what his user-agent (so long as the user-agent also recognizes the standards).
The standards have nothing to do about good design. All they address is across the board functional design. IMO, I think that on this page WaSP has sacrificed some quality of design to showcase what can be done within the standards. That is a reasonable design trade-off, and it has nothing to do with standards compliance.
In this instance, you need to realize that WaSP's core audience, the group they are hoping to influence, is not the average guy using his browser in the usual way. Their audience consists of web designers and others who are pretty sophisticated in their use of the browser, and are likely to have their browser window set at around 700px width, in a corner of their 1600x1200 screen.
John Carroll's criticisms are neither technical nor related to the suitability of open source for any given purpose. Strip down his prose, and he is encouraging people to refuse the gifts of open source because there is no guarantee that there will be more gifts tomorrow.
Perl and Apache have enriched me; I am wealthier for their use. Mozilla looks like it is going to give me a huge amount of value, too. Yeah, maybe the open source approach won't be able to sustain itself, but in the meantime it is exceedingly stupid for any person or business not to make use of the wealth that is being made available.
John Carroll, you are fudding, and doing a pretty poor job of it, too.
Looking at this as a direct action against the current Administration is missing the point.
This is more like the first round in a battle to shape the campaign issues of October. It points out something that I've been aware of first hand for years (I worked in IT in a VA hospital from 93 - 01)-- that US Federal agencies spend a huge amount of money on Microsoft upgrades, and even more on hardware upgrades that are necessary only because of the Microsoft upgrades.
No argument, but maybe not the important thing here. MS's visible organization is that of a corporation. But Microsoft is well-versed in the uses of publicly maintaining an API or DOM that does not necessarily reflect the internal, proprietary mechanisms that actually do the work.
...bound to it's shareholders,
Well, sort of. The majority of MS stockholders are a rather small group of people strongly involved in MS's actual operations. These people are not representative of the general category of "stockholders" in the Wall Street sense.
...and is chartered to make a profit.
Yes, but with MS the profit motive is no longer the main thing, if it ever had been. At this point, continued profit appears to be a necessary but incidental part of pursuing other goals.
Pointers to data that back up the assertions
There are several, but one stands out: a corporation guided by simple profit motive is not going to end up with $40 billion of liquid reserves. That is profit withheld from the stockholders.
Keeping that much money in liquid assets and staying out of trouble with various regulatory agencies is not a burden most corporations would take on. The normal daily movements of this much cash can cause booms and busts in whole industries if not managed very carefully. MS has to be putting a lot of its brainpower into managing this reserve in a way that doesn't call in the regulators or otherwise get them into trouble.
There has never been a corporation with such a huge amount of liquidity. The for-profit corporate model no longer applies to Microsoft (if it ever did).
So where is this going?
Idunno. Maybe this is just a rant.
But it seems to me that if you want to try to get Microsoft to buy in on Open Source, you'll need to get into the dream space of Bill Gates and his cadre. That shouldn't be too hard: he likes to play the role of visionary.
If you can find out what science fiction has influenced him and his buddies, what utopia he is working towards, and then show an Open Source path that will go there, then maybe that would be of some interest to the powers that drive Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
I fully agree with this. And I also mostly agree with those that say much of this law is redundant. I'll explain:
Case law, that which is built on precedent, undoubtedly would get around to modifying all the existing laws that recent IT advances have impacted. But that process is slow, meandering, and patchwork. It is slow because given the choice between arguing a test case of some new notion of law or getting an easy conviction based on a more conservative approach, a prosecutor best serves the people by going with the easy approach. Courts do make the law-- but they work really hard at doing so as little as possible. Second point: the case law approach to this will meander-- there is no way of saying what sections of the law will be clarified first. That will be depend on what the criminals do. One implication of this is that relying on case law in this area will guarantee the creation of loopholes. Third point: this is also a patchwork approach since case law applies by jurisdiction. What becomes binding in New England may have no impact in the Pacific Northwest.
A result: it is impossible to develop any kind of reasoned security structures during the years of legal chaos as precedents are established and challenged.
Legislative law gets around all that. Even the most obvious redundancies in this bill have value, because the entirety goes into effect at once. Across all the Federal jurisdictions. And this will make it possible for agencies and programmers to legally develop the means to protect what needs to be protected, working from an established set of criteria about what is legal for them to do and what is out of bounds. Legislation like this is a necessary prerequisite to any kind of reasonable design of security systems.
Chances are that this will be a law of short term effect-- there may not be many prosecutions under it and in ten years it may have no particular value at all. But not all laws should be judged on their eternal value-- some, like this one, are uniquely suited to addressing a short term problem in an efficient way.
I think this bill is probably A Good Thing. I support it, though I recognize that in five years or so I might find myself fighting to repeal some part of it. But that is tomorrow's battle, and it may not even come about.
- into decaying orbits or
- a designated "trash ring" or
- push it to escape velocity
depending on specifics of each piece of junkFunny as it sounds, this could work. A proactive strategy would be based on using single hits over multiple targeting windows to push each piece of junk into decaying orbits or to shepherd junk into a trash ring where our grandkids could mine it (what will be the multiplier for the value of a chunk of scrap metal that is already at orbital velocity?). Beebees that miss would add an insignificant amount of water vapor to the upper atmosphere or leave near Earth space. Each shot would cost no more than the cost of the beebee-- the power is free. Someone could figure out the ratio of the size of the solar array to the number of shots that can be fired in month's time. My wag is that with collectors comparable with today's, the thing could manage a few shots a week.
A program like this would need a good name. I suggest "Space Balls"
I can think of a few business models that a (let's use a stereotype here) young, unemployed, semi-literate mother in an isolated village in India could develop around the Simputer and net access.
Messages and images between relatives, friends, and trade contacts in surrounding villages. (or elsewhere, of course)
Finding repair parts for the local mechanic-- gathering info for a farmer about what other farmers in the region are going to plant next season-- getting price and cost data for diffferent market towns so a craftsman can decide where to peddle his goods
Arranging appointments for villagers at distant locations
Setting up trade meetings-- "meet me at the crossroad tomorrow". Brokering crop futures deals. Managing pre-market bidding of craft wares.
There are programs in place that would provide this young woman with low cost loans to cover her start-up expenses. The Indian government has found that supporting new village entrepreuners and their micro businesses has had demonstrable effects in increasing literacy, decreasing migration of poor to the cities, and decreasing the birthrate (!).
I think the Simputer fits very well into this larger scheme.
His paper is valuable, priceless even, in that it is throwing a spotlight on a part of the Open Source phenomenon that has not yet come into public discussion.
While I don't know COCOMO, I accept that his numbers are highly suspect. But you have provided a range of accuracy that corrects for this. I am very confident that any reasonable assessment of the Linux development effort is going to be greater than $100 million and less than $10 billion.
So it is indisputable that Linux is a resource whose development effort exceeds $100 million.
And no reasonable person can question that this resource is now available at very low cost to anyone or any institution, on a global level.
It is difficult to see how anyone could not recognize that the use of this resource increases global wealth. Linux does make the world pie bigger.
I think that is the real story here. Linux is a tool, a lever, that has required at least $100 million of effort to develop, but which anyone can put to work for extremely low cost. I think this kind of phrasing needs to be brought to the attention of those who are being FUDded by groups that feel threatened by Open Source.
The creator of a product has the moral right to offer his product under whatever terms he wishes. If a potential consumer of that product decides that he does not like those terms, he is free to choose not to use the product in question.
While, if you allow a very vague definition of "moral right", that is sort of true of products offered for sale in the marketplace and other situations where a customer is entering into a contract with a producer, it does not apply to a situation where the producer is required for safety or useability reasons to correct a deficiency in a product or service that has already been contracted for.
On the hardware side, the equivalent to MS putting this EULA on this security patch would be Ford requiring that you agree to replace all your tires with the brand they specify as part of their recall to repair defective seatbelt latches.
On the service side, it is equivalent to a paint contractor saying that they will only fix the bad job they did on the outside of your house if you agree to let them do all your interior painting, too.
It looks to me like Microsoft just wants to stay in court. This is going to guarantee that their legal department will continue to have plenty to do.
and, lol, I'd like to see a court's opinion on the degree to which this unilateral ammendment to the original licensing agreement voids the original license-- there is a distant possibility that anyone who upgrades their MS Multimedia under this provision becomes effectively immune to any charges of violation of other Microsoft EULAs.
--
iI don't care whether you can think outside of the box. Can you think outside of the cliche?
F A N T A S T I C post, thank you!
"...fully buzzword compliant..."
That's priceless! -- I don't care whether you can think outside of the box. Can you think outside of the cliche?
Oooh, I'd like that. I bet rolly-polly butterball dollars would stretch much further than these underfed things they are giving us now.
Gee, I guess it's a matter of what you consider trivial.
Mars is kind of interesting. There is only one of it, and it stands out well against the black backdrop of space. In the altogether, Mars is pretty unique.
Now don't take this personally, but you are only as unique as 6 billion other people. And you pretty much blend in with the crowd.
I think it's useful to keep a proper perspective about such things. If the human experience was about important stuff, then, heck, with 6 billion variations of the basic theme running around, I think we can pretty much say that no matter how you want to go at measuring it, everything important about being human has been done. A lot of times.
But learning new stuff about Mars is entertaining, like a walk through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, or listening to Classical Gas, or seeing a Lucas film. This type of experience can twist my life into a new shape. Maybe a minor twist, or maybe a total change. The only thing I can count on when I have an "art" experience is that I'll be changed in some unexpected way by it. So even though this is a "trivial" experience that hasn't added dollars to my bank account, finding out there was once a big swimming hole on Mars adds something priceless to my imaginations and my life.
Importance is, apparently, something you measure. A way to quantify your life. But when you have counted all the grains of sand and measured all the values of your life down to the the last cent, you've got one row of numbers that really doesn't seem all that significant among the 6 billion other rows. I'd rather look at my life's value in a different way.
So I see the effort we put into learning about Mars as similar to the engineering effort and cost that goes into a Star Wars movie, and I expect the same kind of return on investment: some unexpected change, maybe minor, maybe not. I think our explorations of space are one of the new art forms of our times.
I can accept the round-off of 4840 sqRI = 1 STU. Even though the base linear Rhode Island unit is demonstrably not only imaginary but also inconceivable (it ain't even an island ferkriesache!)
But ya gotta realize that 3 microTexi = 1 standard sandbox (SSB).
So does anybody know how many skoshes in a nanoTexas?
And another thing (to bring this back on target): is it really appropriate to apply units of dry area to Martian wetlands?
[the boss] quotes a development time of 2 weeks to a client, but because of the scale and complexity of the aplication we're building, that turns into 2 months. Needless to say, clients aren't happy...
But they are your clients. You and the other tech aren't sitting around tweaking your configurations while waiting for The Next Paying Contract to come in. If your boss was more realistic in his timeline assessments, would he be putting your company at a competitive disadvantage? Is he actually doing some shrewd Yankee Trader assessments about the prospect's level of plausible fantasy and his toleration for disappointments with slipping deadlines? If your company is getting a reasonable amount of repeat business, maybe your boss is doing a pretty good job in his own field. There are an awful lot of industries where its carnie against carnie, and if your tech work is a part of one of those, then you really do want PT Barnum in your boss' role.
I think, though, that we've moved away from project management into a sidebar about the interface between technicians and salespeople.
Ideally, project management would accept input from both sales and technical, and develop a strategy that you might be squeamish about, but that didn't actually cause you to hurl. That might mean be willing to keep your mouth shut about obvious gaps between what is promised and what is realistic-- but if you are in one of the intrinsically dirty businesses, then you should be willing to take some of the tarnish.
...this "version fatigue". I hope it gets as widely adopted as "vaporware" did. Version fatigue is an excellent way to describe that part of so many new releases of older products that are nothing more than moving the chrome around on the sheet metal, and have nothing to do with the underlying chassis and powertrain.
Sometimes one pithy identification of a problem is enough to cause radical changes for the better. Version fatigue might be a very powerful addition to the lexicon.
"...a recruiter contacted me with a very nice potential position - I interviewed... decided I was interested... [I was] extended a counter-offer with a matching salary, thereby eliminating my only reason for considering the other job...."
The arguments for refusing a counter-offer are strong. But they may not apply in your situation, where a recruiter found you rather than you actively looking for another job.
How much effort did you put into the interview process with the other company? Was it a lark? Something to do with an empty weekend? Make some assessment of how much you cared whether you would get an offer. If you cared a great deal, then chances are you should take the offer. To do otherwise is to be second-guessing yourself.
Look at the other side of this, too. What is your current employer's policy on job reviews? If your manager merely pushed your annual review forward by 6 weeks and was able to use your job offer as a justification for doing something he thinks is good for the business (such as retaining a valuable employee), then the problems with staying on are going to be relatively minor.
If you do decide to stay on, you and your manager should work out what changes in your responsibilities go along with the increase in pay. There needs to be such a change. It does not need to involve an increase in your daily workload (at least at first): formal recognition of something that you've already taken on in an informal way would be excellent. Or it could be something like the role of technical advisor to policy decisions. But there needs to be something that clearly shows that your raise is related to your future contributions to the company, and that the outside job offer did no more than spur along a process that was moseying toward increasing your responsibilities anyway.
If management balks at this job redefinition, then it is certainly time to move on.
Well, let's see. Where to start?
Sir, I take issue with you saying that WaSP obey standards. WaSP historically have always been syntactically compliant; passing through validator.w3.org without issue, but time and time again they have abused the usage of w3c xhtml/html as per the spec.
You've expanded the subject of discussion from a relatively narrow focus on one web page to a much more global condemnation. I can't say I'm terribly interested in going along with this. But I suppose I can spare you my afternoon coffeebreak. So let's get on with then...
<snippage> I present exhibit 2, their default font size as mentioned in this very thread. Obeying standards - by definition - means coding to them - and not diverting from the standards to cope with implementation issues. Here WaSP use a smaller font-size than regular - when 'font-size:regular' is intended to be used for the body of the document. No syntax was broken - only standards.
Ah, replying to you isn't going to take much time a all!
Let me point out to those who aren't familiar with CSS that "regular" is not one of the allowed values for font-size property. There is no such thing. A forgiving user-agent will ignore this declaration, but there may be some that will give an error message and refuse to display the page.
IMO, there is no point in conducting discussions about standards with persons who lack a fundamental understanding of the area the standards govern, or who are too sloppy in their work to cross-check critical details in their arguments. Come back again when you are better prepared to talk about the subject. I expect, though, that in your preparations you will discover that there is a big difference between a codified standard and any of the myriad of (often conflicting) rationales that came into play during its discussion.
Just for the record, the WaSP style sheet uses
, which sets the font relative to the user-agent's default. This is generally considered to be good practice by those concerned with browser ergonomics.I've got that page open in the second tab of Moz as I write this. It is liquid from any browser width down to 410 px. Below that, it degrades acceptably (remains readable) until the columns are just a single word wide, well below the limit of reason. All text responds to user-agent changes in the font size, and the layout reflows without problems. I've looked at their stylesheet and it looks good (wsp/css).
There is no may about it; this page does "abide by all the standards."
Does it also abide by the spirit of the standards?
Yes. The standards are not intended to lock you into any design style. There is no "best" design style. The standards were developed to assure that material written to the standard will be presented to the reader no matter what his user-agent (so long as the user-agent also recognizes the standards).
The standards have nothing to do about good design. All they address is across the board functional design. IMO, I think that on this page WaSP has sacrificed some quality of design to showcase what can be done within the standards. That is a reasonable design trade-off, and it has nothing to do with standards compliance.
In this instance, you need to realize that WaSP's core audience, the group they are hoping to influence, is not the average guy using his browser in the usual way. Their audience consists of web designers and others who are pretty sophisticated in their use of the browser, and are likely to have their browser window set at around 700px width, in a corner of their 1600x1200 screen.
John Carroll's criticisms are neither technical nor related to the suitability of open source for any given purpose. Strip down his prose, and he is encouraging people to refuse the gifts of open source because there is no guarantee that there will be more gifts tomorrow.
Perl and Apache have enriched me; I am wealthier for their use. Mozilla looks like it is going to give me a huge amount of value, too. Yeah, maybe the open source approach won't be able to sustain itself, but in the meantime it is exceedingly stupid for any person or business not to make use of the wealth that is being made available.
John Carroll, you are fudding, and doing a pretty poor job of it, too.
Looking at this as a direct action against the current Administration is missing the point.
This is more like the first round in a battle to shape the campaign issues of October. It points out something that I've been aware of first hand for years (I worked in IT in a VA hospital from 93 - 01)-- that US Federal agencies spend a huge amount of money on Microsoft upgrades, and even more on hardware upgrades that are necessary only because of the Microsoft upgrades.
General Assertions:
Microsoft is a corporation, ...
No argument, but maybe not the important thing here. MS's visible organization is that of a corporation. But Microsoft is well-versed in the uses of publicly maintaining an API or DOM that does not necessarily reflect the internal, proprietary mechanisms that actually do the work.
Well, sort of. The majority of MS stockholders are a rather small group of people strongly involved in MS's actual operations. These people are not representative of the general category of "stockholders" in the Wall Street sense.
Yes, but with MS the profit motive is no longer the main thing, if it ever had been. At this point, continued profit appears to be a necessary but incidental part of pursuing other goals.
Pointers to data that back up the assertions
There are several, but one stands out: a corporation guided by simple profit motive is not going to end up with $40 billion of liquid reserves. That is profit withheld from the stockholders.
Keeping that much money in liquid assets and staying out of trouble with various regulatory agencies is not a burden most corporations would take on. The normal daily movements of this much cash can cause booms and busts in whole industries if not managed very carefully. MS has to be putting a lot of its brainpower into managing this reserve in a way that doesn't call in the regulators or otherwise get them into trouble.
There has never been a corporation with such a huge amount of liquidity. The for-profit corporate model no longer applies to Microsoft (if it ever did).
So where is this going?
Idunno. Maybe this is just a rant.
But it seems to me that if you want to try to get Microsoft to buy in on Open Source, you'll need to get into the dream space of Bill Gates and his cadre. That shouldn't be too hard: he likes to play the role of visionary.
If you can find out what science fiction has influenced him and his buddies, what utopia he is working towards, and then show an Open Source path that will go there, then maybe that would be of some interest to the powers that drive Microsoft.