In twenty or thirty years, nanotech will be shuffling genes like a deck of cards in Maverick's hands...
And also shuffling human cells the same way...
You ain't seen nothing yet.
Cancer will be history, the common cold a memory, and in a few decades every female will be able to look as good as one of the Corrs and every male look as good as...well, maybe not Jim...:-)
And cloning? Who cares about that? There is virtually NO advantage to cloning a human in terms of the end result as an adult human. There obviously are useful research results to be gained by doing human cloning research, but as a practical matter, no one has yet brought up a reason to actually clone a human with the express purpose of producing a cloned adult - other than to prove it can be done - which is a fairly lame reason to do it.
Wait until nanotech allows the EXACT DUPLICATION of a human being from the molecules on up. That's when things will get interesting. However, that probably won't be on the agenda for another fifty years or so, at least. And by then, it might be made irrelevant by other nanotech applications of farther reaching importance.
No, all of this hand-wringing comes from the usual group of philosophically-challenged "ethicists" whose sole function is to prove themselves more "ethical" (and by implication, therefore, "better") than other people.
As I've said before, Windows is now so bloated and so complex that even Microsoft can't figure out how to enhance it or even change it anymore.
That's why WinFS was jettisoned (along with the simple fact that the concept is damn hard to implement.) And I expect much of Avalon to be jettisoned before this year is over.
End result: an OS which is not significantly better than Windows XP - just as XP was not significantly better than Windows 2000 - which is why it took three years for XP conversion to overtake 2000 and 98.
And I think Microsoft's purchase of a spyware and now (TWO!) antivirus companies is a tacit acknowledgement that this is true, and their only hope for "improvements" in security is to sell their own security tools to fix the problems created by their original software. Brilliant marketing, too - typical human behavior: make mistakes, then make money making more mistakes to try to cover for the first mistakes...but never, EVER ADMIT you made a mistake...
I just hope Linux can avoid the same fate.
Given the higher quality of OSS code, hopefully it will at least take longer for it to happen.
Right, MS really has all that market pressure to release stuff early...uh, uh...
Well, they obviously aren't bending to it, are they?
Actually, they're real problem is "featuritis". If they didn't feel like loading down the damn OS with crap nobody uses and can't figure out how to use (like Group Policy before Windows Server 2003), they might get a product out on time.
I got the same problem with Opera. Idiots want to put voice recognition in the damn thing when their CSS support is STILL not complete...
Wouldn't it be wonderful if product managers had a clue that software should actually do what it is claimed to do and via the standards as well?
But you're right, we should give them all the time they need to hang themselves - and give Linux more time to take it all away from them...
Do keep in mind that Proudhon also said, "Property is freedom."
He wasn't merely being French, he was making the point that the free market is freedom, whereas control of property by the rich supporters of the state isn't.
if Sun provides a decent competitor to Access on the desktop - one that's better and better supported by them than the new database being introduced with OpenOffice 2.
Sun is in no position to beat Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase, or (in the OSS community) MySQL, FireBird, and PostgreSQL with something new in that space. No community for one thing, no rep for another.
If it's just a "warm fuzzy" for their locked-in customers nervous about open-sourcing Solaris, then it's irrelevant to the rest of us.
Nobody said that EVERYTHING is going to break on Longhorn.
But enough of it is going to break to make switching a pain in the butt, you can be sure about that. But not so much is going to break that NOBODY is going to switch.
The stupid large corporations are screwed anyway, because they have vendor lock-in due to their unwillingness to train anybody to use another OS, so they'll buy Longhorn regardless of the expense and conversion problems.
Small businesses, OTOH, have somewhat more flexibility to switch to another OS or keep using the old one. This varies by business since some businesses don't want to train or convert either.
It took three years for most people to upgrade from Windows 2000 and 98 to XP because there wasn't enough reason to do so (from 2000 anyway). Microsoft doesn't want to repeat that mistake. ALso they want to differentiate from Linux more strongly. So this time the OS will be VERY different - which will break things.
Microsoft doesn't care because they have forced the corporations into a licensing scheme that pretty much forces corps to upgrade every three years or lose money on the deal (even though they've already lost money since Longhorn is late - a major corp complaint.)
However, if the hardware upgrade requirements are as reported, Microsoft could find itself in deep crap. Which is probably why they dumped WinFS (which, BTW, is a feature they've been promising for about the last ten years - and haven't delivered on yet). I expect to see Avalon reduced in functionality over the next year as well - with the result that Longhorn will end up being just a different version of XP with some new eye-candy - and Microsoft will be back where it started with no one bothering to upgrade.
The bottom line: Windows is now so bloated and so screwed up that even Microsoft can't change it effectively.
Re:Welcome To The Federal Justice System!
on
DDOS Mafia On The Loose
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
While it's true that being a snitch is not a life-prolonging event in the Federal system, in this case, if the chemist had snitched, he'd probably have done little or no time, so it would have been irrelevant. It's unlikely he would have been harmed outside of the joint.
The point is, the Feds were unconcerned about letting a bunch of drug dealers go while they harassed some guy that was not that important. Their justification for this is always that the chemist is the irreplaceable quantity in a drug ring - but the real reason is, if you have more drug dealers on the street, you get more (re)arrests, more convictions - and more career advancement. That simple.
Cops want laws not because the laws are effective, but precisely because they are ineffective.
Laws create crime - and the state needs crime (and foreign enemies) to justify its existence and enable it to rule over the populations.
"Yet prosecutors are dropping charges, so they can get the criminals to snitch on other criminals. Oi vey."
You don't know how it works, do you?
I knew a guy in the Alameda County Jail (in California) who was, like me, a Federal detainee awaiting trial. He was the chemist for a drug ring. The ring got busted; he got arrested along with the kingpins involved. The Feds threatened him with 25 years or whatever if he didn't roll over on the kingpins. He refused. Although he had no other criminal record, he was going to be charged with multiple counts totalling a lot of years in the joint. Meanwhile, the kingpins rolled over on everybody and got sentences of probation, four months, time served, etc. In other words, they rolled right out of jail and went right back to work while the one guy who was not a dealer - but who also was not a rat - got major time.
This is how the Feds get their 98% conviction rate. You are arrested, threatened with fifty years in the joint unless you rat out all your relatives and everyone else you know. Then you get only ten years in the joint. Their evidence against you is the same crap info they got from YOUR relatives in exchange for the same deal. Everybody rolls over on everybody - whether they're guilty or innocent doesn't matter.
Of course, in some case, the relatives roll over on somebody who is not a relative in order to protect their relatives. The effect is the same. I had a cellie who was an idiot who merely held stash for some dealers. When arrested, his contact told the judge he was the major player in order to protect the dealer's brother-in-law who was the real local partner in the ring. When my cellie met the head of the ring in a holding cell, the head told him he'd never heard of him but he knew of the relative. When my cellie had his lawyer bring this up to the judge, the judge said he didn't want to hear the testimony of the head man because he was "just a drug dealer" - despite the fact that my cellie had been convicted on the testimony of a lesser drug dealer with a relative to protect and a Federal deal encouraging him to rat out innocent (well, relatively innocent in my cellie's case) people.
And of course, there's the case of Kevin Mitnick and Justin Petersen...The FBI ran this one-legged crook while he took advantage of the FBI to run his own scams - eventually embarassing the FBI.
Not to mention the FBI agents in Boston and the Whitey Bulger case.
You think there's any rationality to any of this? You've got to be kidding.
The bank will just call you AFTER they call the FBI and the DEA and the NSA and the CIA and THEY will arrest you, have Bush declare you an "enemy combatant", and then send you to Gitmo (perhaps AFTER sending you to Turkey or Saudi Arabia to be tortured for a couple months - BEFORE torturing you themselves at Gitmo).
After all, according to Rush, if you have a "business partner" in Russia, you HAVE to be some kind of "commie pinko anti-patriotic terrorist Russian Mafia scumbag"...
Welcome to America! Land of the free! Home of the brave (like Jonah Goldberg at the National Review)!
Sure, that works, and you're right, if you've modified it manually, you want to keep changes.
Didn't apply in my case. Making me go in (not that I bothered, actually) and edit out the crap is just piss-poor design.
If Linux did this crap, the Windows trolls would never stop complaining about it...citing it as "non-professional hobbyist software that wasn't commercial grade"...
"No one has ever asserted that "no one" will invent."
You haven't bothered reading any of the/. posts numerous times over the last week (probably) let alone anything else ever written on the subject, have you? This is EXACTLY what is asserted by the RIAA, the MPAA, and everybody else decrying any form IP roll-back.
When I say get to market fast, I said nothing about incompetency. And Microsoft is a clear demonstration that taking years to get to market doesn't mean a decent product, either.
"If the issue were as simple and obvious as you assert, then a whole lot of people have made a whole lot of unwise choices."
"in exchange for the tyranny of a state-sponsored monopoly, the public gets free use of a disclosed technology."
Free? Since when has it been free? They get it after the monopoly profit has been made and they get it years after they should have (although I agree that patents last a shorter time than copyrights, which is good.)
As for trade-secret law, I oppose ALL IP laws. As for companies protecting trade secrets, this is extremely difficult to do since the product has to be sold and the manufacturing process can usually be easily reproduced - or an equivalent product produced (Pepsi vrs. Coke - who really gives a shit which one is "secret" - and Coke's process isn't secret anyway...)
As for companies hiding R&D results, certainly if they spent X billion AND no OTHER company wishes to invest an equivalent amount, then the release of that research to the public is slowed, to the detriment of the species. However, it is no different if the research is patented and protected by the state for X years. Can you cite any case where a critical technology was hidden successfully by a corporation from all other pursuers for years longer than patents would have protected them? I doubt it.
And even if you can, it doesn't change the basic logic that such research should be released in the form of a functional product that is unprotected. Patents are an odd way of making sure something is made available, at best.
As for the framers of the Constitution, they were subject to the same illogic as the rest of humanity. As for America's prominence, this has FAR more to do with being a coherent large country with (relative) economic and political freedom for the first century or so than it does the patent system. As for the rest of the world adopting the same system, it just proves that greed is universal.
"A lot of microcontrollers do have watchdog timers to automatically reboot the chip should the software be unresponsive."
Interesting - and smart. I wish PC software had that so I didn't have to wait twenty or thirty seconds...or a minute...or FIVE minutes...while some stupid OS waits for some lousy driver to discover it's not going to get a response from some other object...
NOTHING is more irritating than having your entire system frozen while the software screws up - when a simple "HEY! CANCEL this operation, you moron!" would suffice...and no, the "Stop" or "Cancel" button is unresponsive, too...sigh...
WHY THE HELL HAVE A CANCEL BUTTON IF THE FUCKING THING IS FROZEN??!! Morons!!
Doesn't ANYBODY test their freakin' software anymore? Doesn't ANYBODY have a goddamn clue about software interface design?
Would have been worse if it came back up reporting TWO copies of the flight plan......like Windows XP does when you "fix" the boot configuration menu...
Fucking morons at Microsoft can't even re-generate a fucking text file properly...something LILO has been doing for ten years...
OR...if the "fix" didn't "take" at all...as when Windows XP does not retain your wallpaper setting and insists on tiling everything even when you told it on the settings panel to center, damnit, CENTER!
"The downside to this is that suppressed inventions will usually be rediscovered, by someone who's not in the same position and who opts to take a different route."
Which is exactly why software patents are a state means of creating monopolies and are thus NOT beneficial to the advancement of the species.
The bottom-line professed concept of IP is that no one will innovate without the chance to make monopoly levels of profit. The unstated - and sometimes stated - assumption is also that if there is no monopoly, that there will be NO profit and thus no innovation. This has never been proven or even demonstrated. Logically, practically and historically, it is also completely ridiculous. Profit is profit. And you can make adequate profit in a wide-open market by competing on both new technology and quality service, better marketing, better financial backing, and a host of other factors that contribute to or diminish business success. Innovation is a primary requirement, but not the only one.
You do have to remember that in a wide-open free market, profit tends to quickly diminish to the general rate of return. Therefore the proper means of competing in a free market is to get to market quickly with a superior product, price it to sell fast, make your money fast, and get on with the next product.
The overall effect of an economy based on this principle is RAPID technological advancement which is the primary benefit of the exercise for the species.
Any attempt to SLOW this process by creating artificial monopolies by law inhibits this benefit.
ALL IP law is detrimental to the advancement of the species. Period.
Well, just to offer the opposite situation, tonight I downloaded a Word document from one of my teachers Web site and OpenOffice just totally failed to open it, generated its error report message, and on completing that, crashed.
So you definitely can screw OpenOffice with certain Word documents - even ones without macros. This one didn't seem to have anything special about it, but it opens fine in Word 20003. I suppose it might have some "hidden data" or something in the file - another bonus from Office that allows anyone to spy on your mistakes and confidential data you thought you'd gotten rid of.
All of this irrelevant to the issue of interoperability, however, since as others have pointed out, Microsoft Office isn't even interoperable with itself - and the rest of Windows isn't interoperable with anything (unless you install UNIX Services for Windows, I guess.)
Well, actually, it only takes half the time to install Linux than it does Windows.
The rest of the weekend you get to play with the hundreds of applications that Windows DOESN'T give you in a default install...:-)
(And of course, you'll also need half a day to get your NIC or something working, I suppose...since you didn't bother to check whether your modem was a Winmodem or some other piece of crap produced because Windows is a monopoly...)
Using an AMD 1800 is better than the Via C3 that one of the other cheap Linux laptops uses...
They're low-balling you on the memory, though. Should be 256MB.
Still, with even used laptops with PII CPUs and much less hard disk going for $240-300 on the used market, this is a good buy for a new laptop with Linux pre-installed.
going to change the murder rate among D.C. nigger drug dealers?
Which is where ninety percent of the murder rate in D.C. comes from...
Oh, it doesn't? Then how come when word went around Leavenworth that a bunch of D.C. niggers were being transferred there that the Leavenworth inmates (the white ones, anyway) were pissed off because D.C. niggers had a rep for being disruptive overly violent assholes - even in comparison to Leavenworth niggers?
That's right - I used the "N" word - just like every black prison inmate does 24/7...and just like I use the word "redneck" to refer to rural white assholes or "punk" to refer to urban white assholes...
And I don't give a rat's ass if anyone doesn't like it...
If a black doesn't act like a nigger, I'll stop calling him one...
First, the "Microsoft tax" is not just on the purchase price of the first year's license, it's on the all the years following.
Second, if corporations are too stupid to figure out how to save money, they should be out of business.
And everybody knows MOST corporations - the bigger the better - are LOUSY at figuring out how to save money. Which is why they spend most of their time raising prices, cutting customer service and having their accountants nickle and dime the IRS.
Because management are morons.
As this "World Bank CTO" clearly demonstrates.
If this idiot wants to demonstrate "hard truth", he's started off really badly.
Re: Part I: Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous on Feb 04, 2005 - 01:56 PM It is much easier to see the difference on a server where the market is more mature. Just check out Dell.
No Operating System [free] Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition 32-bit [add $799] Windows 2003 Small Business Server, Premium Edition [add $1,299] Windows 2003 Small Business Server, Standard Edition [add $499] Red Hat Linux ES 3.0, 1 Year Red Hat Network Subscription [add $349] Red Hat Linux ES 3.0, 3 Year Red Hat Network Subscription [add $999]
Nobody says you have have to buy a service contract from Redhat. The software is free to download from their website.
With Redhat you are buying a service contract, not software. I know of one company that doesn't understand this and pays RH close to $1M a year and virtually never calls them. For $1M a year they should dress in penguin suits and stand in the parking lot waiting for problems.
The real problem with Microsoft is that you pay once for the product and then over and over again for service. Plus their service is awful. Call one of their tech support lines and see if they can answer anything but the most basic questions. Linux lets you split the software from the service.
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$35/hour for small business, $25/hour for home users, one hour minimum, half-hour increments.
That's for "the usual" - setup, upgrades, spyware removal, etc.
Development and "project" rates depend on the circumstances - and how rich (and how much of an asshole) you are.
My business card says, "Computer Problems Solved CHEAP!"
In twenty or thirty years, nanotech will be shuffling genes like a deck of cards in Maverick's hands...
And also shuffling human cells the same way...
You ain't seen nothing yet.
Cancer will be history, the common cold a memory, and in a few decades every female will be able to look as good as one of the Corrs and every male look as good as...well, maybe not Jim...:-)
And cloning? Who cares about that? There is virtually NO advantage to cloning a human in terms of the end result as an adult human. There obviously are useful research results to be gained by doing human cloning research, but as a practical matter, no one has yet brought up a reason to actually clone a human with the express purpose of producing a cloned adult - other than to prove it can be done - which is a fairly lame reason to do it.
Wait until nanotech allows the EXACT DUPLICATION of a human being from the molecules on up. That's when things will get interesting. However, that probably won't be on the agenda for another fifty years or so, at least. And by then, it might be made irrelevant by other nanotech applications of farther reaching importance.
No, all of this hand-wringing comes from the usual group of philosophically-challenged "ethicists" whose sole function is to prove themselves more "ethical" (and by implication, therefore, "better") than other people.
As I've said before, Windows is now so bloated and so complex that even Microsoft can't figure out how to enhance it or even change it anymore.
That's why WinFS was jettisoned (along with the simple fact that the concept is damn hard to implement.) And I expect much of Avalon to be jettisoned before this year is over.
End result: an OS which is not significantly better than Windows XP - just as XP was not significantly better than Windows 2000 - which is why it took three years for XP conversion to overtake 2000 and 98.
And I think Microsoft's purchase of a spyware and now (TWO!) antivirus companies is a tacit acknowledgement that this is true, and their only hope for "improvements" in security is to sell their own security tools to fix the problems created by their original software. Brilliant marketing, too - typical human behavior: make mistakes, then make money making more mistakes to try to cover for the first mistakes...but never, EVER ADMIT you made a mistake...
I just hope Linux can avoid the same fate.
Given the higher quality of OSS code, hopefully it will at least take longer for it to happen.
"all that market pressure to release stuff early"
Right, MS really has all that market pressure to release stuff early...uh, uh...
Well, they obviously aren't bending to it, are they?
Actually, they're real problem is "featuritis". If they didn't feel like loading down the damn OS with crap nobody uses and can't figure out how to use (like Group Policy before Windows Server 2003), they might get a product out on time.
I got the same problem with Opera. Idiots want to put voice recognition in the damn thing when their CSS support is STILL not complete...
Wouldn't it be wonderful if product managers had a clue that software should actually do what it is claimed to do and via the standards as well?
But you're right, we should give them all the time they need to hang themselves - and give Linux more time to take it all away from them...
Do keep in mind that Proudhon also said, "Property is freedom."
He wasn't merely being French, he was making the point that the free market is freedom, whereas control of property by the rich supporters of the state isn't.
if Sun provides a decent competitor to Access on the desktop - one that's better and better supported by them than the new database being introduced with OpenOffice 2.
Sun is in no position to beat Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase, or (in the OSS community) MySQL, FireBird, and PostgreSQL with something new in that space. No community for one thing, no rep for another.
If it's just a "warm fuzzy" for their locked-in customers nervous about open-sourcing Solaris, then it's irrelevant to the rest of us.
Nobody said that EVERYTHING is going to break on Longhorn.
But enough of it is going to break to make switching a pain in the butt, you can be sure about that. But not so much is going to break that NOBODY is going to switch.
The stupid large corporations are screwed anyway, because they have vendor lock-in due to their unwillingness to train anybody to use another OS, so they'll buy Longhorn regardless of the expense and conversion problems.
Small businesses, OTOH, have somewhat more flexibility to switch to another OS or keep using the old one. This varies by business since some businesses don't want to train or convert either.
It took three years for most people to upgrade from Windows 2000 and 98 to XP because there wasn't enough reason to do so (from 2000 anyway). Microsoft doesn't want to repeat that mistake. ALso they want to differentiate from Linux more strongly. So this time the OS will be VERY different - which will break things.
Microsoft doesn't care because they have forced the corporations into a licensing scheme that pretty much forces corps to upgrade every three years or lose money on the deal (even though they've already lost money since Longhorn is late - a major corp complaint.)
However, if the hardware upgrade requirements are as reported, Microsoft could find itself in deep crap. Which is probably why they dumped WinFS (which, BTW, is a feature they've been promising for about the last ten years - and haven't delivered on yet). I expect to see Avalon reduced in functionality over the next year as well - with the result that Longhorn will end up being just a different version of XP with some new eye-candy - and Microsoft will be back where it started with no one bothering to upgrade.
The bottom line: Windows is now so bloated and so screwed up that even Microsoft can't change it effectively.
While it's true that being a snitch is not a life-prolonging event in the Federal system, in this case, if the chemist had snitched, he'd probably have done little or no time, so it would have been irrelevant. It's unlikely he would have been harmed outside of the joint.
The point is, the Feds were unconcerned about letting a bunch of drug dealers go while they harassed some guy that was not that important. Their justification for this is always that the chemist is the irreplaceable quantity in a drug ring - but the real reason is, if you have more drug dealers on the street, you get more (re)arrests, more convictions - and more career advancement. That simple.
Cops want laws not because the laws are effective, but precisely because they are ineffective.
Laws create crime - and the state needs crime (and foreign enemies) to justify its existence and enable it to rule over the populations.
"Yet prosecutors are dropping charges, so they can get the criminals to snitch on other criminals. Oi vey."
You don't know how it works, do you?
I knew a guy in the Alameda County Jail (in California) who was, like me, a Federal detainee awaiting trial. He was the chemist for a drug ring. The ring got busted; he got arrested along with the kingpins involved. The Feds threatened him with 25 years or whatever if he didn't roll over on the kingpins. He refused. Although he had no other criminal record, he was going to be charged with multiple counts totalling a lot of years in the joint. Meanwhile, the kingpins rolled over on everybody and got sentences of probation, four months, time served, etc. In other words, they rolled right out of jail and went right back to work while the one guy who was not a dealer - but who also was not a rat - got major time.
This is how the Feds get their 98% conviction rate. You are arrested, threatened with fifty years in the joint unless you rat out all your relatives and everyone else you know. Then you get only ten years in the joint. Their evidence against you is the same crap info they got from YOUR relatives in exchange for the same deal. Everybody rolls over on everybody - whether they're guilty or innocent doesn't matter.
Of course, in some case, the relatives roll over on somebody who is not a relative in order to protect their relatives. The effect is the same. I had a cellie who was an idiot who merely held stash for some dealers. When arrested, his contact told the judge he was the major player in order to protect the dealer's brother-in-law who was the real local partner in the ring. When my cellie met the head of the ring in a holding cell, the head told him he'd never heard of him but he knew of the relative. When my cellie had his lawyer bring this up to the judge, the judge said he didn't want to hear the testimony of the head man because he was "just a drug dealer" - despite the fact that my cellie had been convicted on the testimony of a lesser drug dealer with a relative to protect and a Federal deal encouraging him to rat out innocent (well, relatively innocent in my cellie's case) people.
And of course, there's the case of Kevin Mitnick and Justin Petersen...The FBI ran this one-legged crook while he took advantage of the FBI to run his own scams - eventually embarassing the FBI.
Not to mention the FBI agents in Boston and the Whitey Bulger case.
You think there's any rationality to any of this?
You've got to be kidding.
No, the bank won't.
The bank will just call you AFTER they call the FBI and the DEA and the NSA and the CIA and THEY will arrest you, have Bush declare you an "enemy combatant", and then send you to Gitmo (perhaps AFTER sending you to Turkey or Saudi Arabia to be tortured for a couple months - BEFORE torturing you themselves at Gitmo).
After all, according to Rush, if you have a "business partner" in Russia, you HAVE to be some kind of "commie pinko anti-patriotic terrorist Russian Mafia scumbag"...
Welcome to America! Land of the free! Home of the brave (like Jonah Goldberg at the National Review)!
"We are a global enterprise and we are just following international practice to enforce our IP rights"
And somebody just criticized my opposition to IP laws because "the rest of the world has adopted the American model"...like that meant something...
Well, here you go...
Sure, that works, and you're right, if you've modified it manually, you want to keep changes.
Didn't apply in my case. Making me go in (not that I bothered, actually) and edit out the crap is just piss-poor design.
If Linux did this crap, the Windows trolls would never stop complaining about it...citing it as "non-professional hobbyist software that wasn't commercial grade"...
Only if you are willing to sell...
And there are some other "Big Boys" who might be willing to buy it first (if you're willing to sell to them) just to keep it out of Bill's hands...
Then it should be...
Or the software should be rewritten to be overridden by a CPU interrupt timer...
I can't believe the industry is so stupid that this isn't feasible...
Well, I take that back - yes, I can believe the industry is this stupid...
"No one has ever asserted that "no one" will invent."
/. posts numerous times over the last week (probably) let alone anything else ever written on the subject, have you? This is EXACTLY what is asserted by the RIAA, the MPAA, and everybody else decrying any form IP roll-back.
You haven't bothered reading any of the
When I say get to market fast, I said nothing about incompetency. And Microsoft is a clear demonstration that taking years to get to market doesn't mean a decent product, either.
"If the issue were as simple and obvious as you assert, then a whole lot of people have made a whole lot of unwise choices."
No shit... And completely true...
"in exchange for the tyranny of a state-sponsored monopoly, the public gets free use of a disclosed technology."
Free? Since when has it been free? They get it after the monopoly profit has been made and they get it years after they should have (although I agree that patents last a shorter time than copyrights, which is good.)
As for trade-secret law, I oppose ALL IP laws. As for companies protecting trade secrets, this is extremely difficult to do since the product has to be sold and the manufacturing process can usually be easily reproduced - or an equivalent product produced (Pepsi vrs. Coke - who really gives a shit which one is "secret" - and Coke's process isn't secret anyway...)
As for companies hiding R&D results, certainly if they spent X billion AND no OTHER company wishes to invest an equivalent amount, then the release of that research to the public is slowed, to the detriment of the species. However, it is no different if the research is patented and protected by the state for X years. Can you cite any case where a critical technology was hidden successfully by a corporation from all other pursuers for years longer than patents would have protected them? I doubt it.
And even if you can, it doesn't change the basic logic that such research should be released in the form of a functional product that is unprotected. Patents are an odd way of making sure something is made available, at best.
As for the framers of the Constitution, they were subject to the same illogic as the rest of humanity. As for America's prominence, this has FAR more to do with being a coherent large country with (relative) economic and political freedom for the first century or so than it does the patent system. As for the rest of the world adopting the same system, it just proves that greed is universal.
"A lot of microcontrollers do have watchdog timers to automatically reboot the chip should the software be unresponsive."
Interesting - and smart. I wish PC software had that so I didn't have to wait twenty or thirty seconds...or a minute...or FIVE minutes...while some stupid OS waits for some lousy driver to discover it's not going to get a response from some other object...
NOTHING is more irritating than having your entire system frozen while the software screws up - when a simple "HEY! CANCEL this operation, you moron!" would suffice...and no, the "Stop" or "Cancel" button is unresponsive, too...sigh...
WHY THE HELL HAVE A CANCEL BUTTON IF THE FUCKING THING IS FROZEN??!! Morons!!
Doesn't ANYBODY test their freakin' software anymore? Doesn't ANYBODY have a goddamn clue about software interface design?
Would have been worse if it came back up reporting TWO copies of the flight plan...
Fucking morons at Microsoft can't even re-generate a fucking text file properly...something LILO has been doing for ten years...
OR...if the "fix" didn't "take" at all...as when Windows XP does not retain your wallpaper setting and insists on tiling everything even when you told it on the settings panel to center, damnit, CENTER!
"The downside to this is that suppressed inventions will usually be rediscovered, by someone who's not in the same position and who opts to take a different route."
Which is exactly why software patents are a state means of creating monopolies and are thus NOT beneficial to the advancement of the species.
The bottom-line professed concept of IP is that no one will innovate without the chance to make monopoly levels of profit. The unstated - and sometimes stated - assumption is also that if there is no monopoly, that there will be NO profit and thus no innovation. This has never been proven or even demonstrated. Logically, practically and historically, it is also completely ridiculous. Profit is profit. And you can make adequate profit in a wide-open market by competing on both new technology and quality service, better marketing, better financial backing, and a host of other factors that contribute to or diminish business success. Innovation is a primary requirement, but not the only one.
You do have to remember that in a wide-open free market, profit tends to quickly diminish to the general rate of return. Therefore the proper means of competing in a free market is to get to market quickly with a superior product, price it to sell fast, make your money fast, and get on with the next product.
The overall effect of an economy based on this principle is RAPID technological advancement which is the primary benefit of the exercise for the species.
Any attempt to SLOW this process by creating artificial monopolies by law inhibits this benefit.
ALL IP law is detrimental to the advancement of the species. Period.
Well, just to offer the opposite situation, tonight I downloaded a Word document from one of my teachers Web site and OpenOffice just totally failed to open it, generated its error report message, and on completing that, crashed.
So you definitely can screw OpenOffice with certain Word documents - even ones without macros.
This one didn't seem to have anything special about it, but it opens fine in Word 20003. I suppose it might have some "hidden data" or something in the file - another bonus from Office that allows anyone to spy on your mistakes and confidential data you thought you'd gotten rid of.
All of this irrelevant to the issue of interoperability, however, since as others have pointed out, Microsoft Office isn't even interoperable with itself - and the rest of Windows isn't interoperable with anything (unless you install UNIX Services for Windows, I guess.)
Well, actually, it only takes half the time to install Linux than it does Windows.
The rest of the weekend you get to play with the hundreds of applications that Windows DOESN'T give you in a default install...:-)
(And of course, you'll also need half a day to get your NIC or something working, I suppose...since you didn't bother to check whether your modem was a Winmodem or some other piece of crap produced because Windows is a monopoly...)
Using an AMD 1800 is better than the Via C3 that one of the other cheap Linux laptops uses...
They're low-balling you on the memory, though. Should be 256MB.
Still, with even used laptops with PII CPUs and much less hard disk going for $240-300 on the used market, this is a good buy for a new laptop with Linux pre-installed.
going to change the murder rate among D.C. nigger drug dealers?
Which is where ninety percent of the murder rate in D.C. comes from...
Oh, it doesn't? Then how come when word went around Leavenworth that a bunch of D.C. niggers were being transferred there that the Leavenworth inmates (the white ones, anyway) were pissed off because D.C. niggers had a rep for being disruptive overly violent assholes - even in comparison to Leavenworth niggers?
That's right - I used the "N" word - just like every black prison inmate does 24/7...and just like I use the word "redneck" to refer to rural white assholes or "punk" to refer to urban white assholes...
And I don't give a rat's ass if anyone doesn't like it...
If a black doesn't act like a nigger, I'll stop calling him one...
First, the "Microsoft tax" is not just on the purchase price of the first year's license, it's on the all the years following.
Second, if corporations are too stupid to figure out how to save money, they should be out of business.
And everybody knows MOST corporations - the bigger the better - are LOUSY at figuring out how to save money. Which is why they spend most of their time raising prices, cutting customer service and having their accountants nickle and dime the IRS.
Because management are morons.
As this "World Bank CTO" clearly demonstrates.
If this idiot wants to demonstrate "hard truth", he's started off really badly.
From the following comment to the article:
s px ?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=sc420&s=bsd
Re: Part I: Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth (Score: 2, Informative)
by Anonymous on Feb 04, 2005 - 01:56 PM
It is much easier to see the difference on a server where the market is more mature. Just check out Dell.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.a
No Operating System [free]
Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition 32-bit [add $799]
Windows 2003 Small Business Server, Premium Edition [add $1,299]
Windows 2003 Small Business Server, Standard Edition [add $499]
Red Hat Linux ES 3.0, 1 Year Red Hat Network Subscription [add $349]
Red Hat Linux ES 3.0, 3 Year Red Hat Network Subscription [add $999]
Nobody says you have have to buy a service contract from Redhat. The software is free to download from their website.
With Redhat you are buying a service contract, not software. I know of one company that doesn't understand this and pays RH close to $1M a year and virtually never calls them. For $1M a year they should dress in penguin suits and stand in the parking lot waiting for problems.
The real problem with Microsoft is that you pay once for the product and then over and over again for service. Plus their service is awful. Call one of their tech support lines and see if they can answer anything but the most basic questions. Linux lets you split the software from the service.
Jon Smirl