i've been interested in this question for the last few years. how much do people value the ability to use a relational language and transactional consistency, or for most of these uses are these things just historical artifacts?
In the 7 years I've been working in the industry, I've never delivered a single project that I would trust to a non-ACID database. Ever. And I doubt I ever will. If you want something that will generate some marketing material at high speed, and if it fails, who cares, well, use MySQL. If you want to do something that can handle a million pithy comments and if some of them get lost in the shuffle, who cares, well, that's fine too. Use whatever serves fast. If you're running Google, and it doesn't matter if a node drops out because there is no "right" answer to get wrong in the first place as long as you spit out a bunch of links, well, these sorts of non-resilient systems are fine.
Personally, I've never done projects like that. In my projects, if the data isn't perfect always and forever, it's worse than if it had never been written. It's very existence is a liability, because people will rely on it when they shouldn't, for things that can't get by with "close".
So yes. Transactional consistency and a solid relational model are pretty much mandatory, and not going anywhere soon. The idea that they might be replaced by technology such as this is laughable.
That means your university has been corrupted to the point that you can't even recognize that it was once intended to be a public institution. It has been so polluted with private money, and has so normalized its operations to depend on that private money, that it is unfit to serve the purpose for which it was created. It's just a means of generating more scarcity and leverage now.
'An OS should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying [expletive] about it except the technical people.'
That may be true, but until someone writes open source psychic device drivers, they will continue to be obliged to do so. It's still necessary to tell your OS how to interact with your hardware, and the tools you use to do so are just as important as the kernel.
File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster.
Good News: The integrated spyware/trojan horse functionality has seen significant performance enhancements. The overhead imposed on the various systems that this functionality interacts with has been significantly reduced.
But other tests showed little improvement and in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.
Bad News: The spyware/trojan horse functionality has been even more deeply integrated into the operating system. There are more systems than ever whose performance has been negatively affected by these assaults on the user.
He also specifically said his problem was with an agreement he signed that says they "own" everything he writes. I hate smart people not being allowed to build on the ideas they've had, so I rant. It's not like there's anything useful to be said to the guy anyways...
Oh one additional note, you can't version control the entries in a database. This would be another reason why you want the queries separate. When alot of your code (like I illustrated in my previous example) is based upon schemas, you are relying on your data remaining intact and your database not getting corrupted. At least with a versioning control systems you have your backups, your checkouts, your test environments, your tags and your production code.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The whole point of a database is that it uses transaction logging, which gives you a complete play by play of every single change made to the data since it was created when done properly, and allows you to roll backward and forward in time as you see fit.
It's also part of the reason you don't do joins or foreign keys across databases as a rule. They have separate transaction logs, indexes and locking per database, and when you try to violate those bounds, you're breaking the aspects of the database that made it useful in the first place and turning it into a fragile and corruptible mess.
Good version control systems, on the other hand, are made to be broken casually and merged in a resilient fashion. They're made to enter and leave inconsistent states on a regular basis.
That's what you get for signing such a contract. You should never sign such a contract. You should specifically say that you own things you create during your own time, and ideally you should use different technology to develop your private enterprises than what you use for your clients. That way, it is abundantly clear that you didn't copy anything. A two-year non-compete agreement is more than sufficient to protect their interests against you.
If you want to do things on your own time and reuse them at work, or reuse your existing code base to deliver solutions better and faster, grant your employers an unlimited license to use the things for free, charge them through the nose in hourly fees, stipulate that you own any improvements to your code that don't contain their business logic, and abstract their business logic out well during design so your code doesn't get polluted.
If you're a good coder, you have to protect your right to make a living. These big development houses are competing with each other, and if you aren't making them rich, they'd just as soon you weren't allowed to work anymore in the industry. They'll screw you if you let them.
The world is full of conspiracies. They're all over the place. As a businessman, I'm a conspirator. As someone interested in creating disruptive technologies, I'm a conspirator. Every corporation is an open conspiracy. Conspiracies are everywhere, they're the natural order of our society.
You can say "There are conspiracies behind this, and I'm going to figure them all out", and you never will, and if you do, no one will care. That's one approach.
You can say "There are no conspiracies, the world is simple, there are just co-incidences around, that's all", and if you do, you'll toodle through life with a sense that you know everything that can be known, and what you don't know is unknowable. That's another approach.
The hardest approach is, "There are conspiracies behind this, I can see that they exist in some nebulous form, but I will neither drive myself crazy trying to get to the bottom of it nor will I pretend that the world is the simple thing that my television tells me that it is, I will simply be content to know that these forces are moving with purpose in the world somewhere beyond my sight."
That is the approach that lets you see deeper into the nature of the world without getting obsessed with the trivialities of whose behind it all.
You miss the point. You are on Slashdot, so must have similar interests to me, even though we never meet. THAT is what they're trying to do. Your opinion is probably more relevant than the "raw" results from Google would ever be 75% of the time.
You clearly didn't read the article. What you are describing, however interesting it might be, is not what this project is doing. What this project is doing is rating things associated with my sister highest, my cousin next, my friends next, my co-workers next, my old school chums next, and the rest of the web last.
From the article:
Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user--such as a public LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom.
This is not intended to inform and give people knowledge that wasn't already at their disposal. It is intended to tempt people with things that they might buy on the assumption that their tastes are similar to their friends. It is not a good thing, unless you're looking to be amused or marketed to.
I think coincidence just means that despite being slapped upside the head with a clue, you still don't understand what's going on. It's one thing to accept that some things are beyond your capacity to ever understand but still exist and move on on that basis, it's another thing to believe that just because you can't see the system, it isn't there.
Coincidences are very often the only hints you get that there is a pattern there, and the best you can do is acknowledge that it exists in some shape and move on with that niggling knowledge resting in your head without either obsessing over it or dismissing it.
If you can do that, you can intuitively anticipate patterns that are beyond your capacity to properly understand.
Calling something a coincidence, on the other hand, is a way of psychologically dismissing it. It's a way of protecting a persons sense of being in control, which is very important to most people.
Maybe in the grand scheme of things, I'm wrong, but I find this perspective on the world empowering, so I'll probably keep it regardless.
Co-incidence is what people call it when they're confronted by something systematic that they aren't able to understand. It doesn't exist.
When you can't find the evidence, you look for motive and capacity. That makes it most likely that this was caused by the western warmongers alliance in an effort to cover up operations, or by the religious leaders within Iran in an effort to isolate their population from "corrupting influence".
In light of the real, visible and ongoing efforts being put forth by Iran to humanize their people in the eyes of the world and counteract the demonizing propaganda put out by the US, it's unlikely that they did this to themselves, even though under different circumstances it would be in character.
It seems pretty obvious that this was caused by the US/UK/Israel alliance as a way to strike at the Islamic countries. Not that it really matters who did it, even if you knew, you still wouldn't have any capacity to hold anyone accountable. What matters to Iran is replacing the old infrastructure with a new one that is less vulnerable and prevent the exploitation of the opportunity this provides their enemies to establish vectors for espionage.
For a lot of people, which do you think would be more useful to them:
The critics/reviews all hate this movie/item/type/etc, I won't go see/get/try it.
My friends/aquantances/coworkers all like/bought/ this movie/item/thing/etc, I should go see/get/try it.
The advice of critics and strangers, of course. They do not need a search engine to find out what their friends think, they can just talk to them. This strikes me as a way to further estrange people from each other by allowing them to filter out any dissenting views before they should be forced to confront them. Beyond being a dumb idea, it's socially harmful.
Who would want to use a search engine that put the answers from the experts at the bottom and the answers they could easily get by asking their mom or their roommate at the top?
No, I don't... I haven't seen any competitors to the mafia in ages... there used to be some. Where have they gone? Last time I heard something about fishes, but a fishing trip can't last that long, eh?
Yakusa? They make the mafia look like schoolchildren.
No, what I m saying is that the proposition removes one very important protection: that from voter intimidation.
Historically, that was true. It was possible for a person to intimidate another person with absolutely no evidence.
That is now preventable through technological means in ways that were not possible before.
Therefore, what was once not practical for the reasons you describe is now something that can be considered anew, with consideration given to how those systemic liabilities can be overcome and advantage gained.
Just as an example, a starting point:
If the British can cover entire cities with cameras and have paid staff monitoring them, there is no reason to think we cannot have the data from those cameras redistributed in a fashion that is transparent and impractical to alter after the fact.
It's practical to give every person a personal recorder that can be used in tandem with public recordings to create a body of evidence of the goings on in the world.
That right there goes a long ways towards preventing intimidation of, by and between individuals, and it's not placing people under any more surveillance than they are under already.
You seem to be describing an unrealistic situation. If people were not protected from having their decisions influenced by force, anarchy would be a great way to live. Unfortunately, that would not happen, so systems must be put in place to make things fair and safe.
There is no reason to assume that a direct democracy isn't going to have legal structures to prevent violence just like every other political structure. So what, are you putting forward that only representative democracies are able to do this effectively? If not, then precisely what is your point?
To go through with elections the way the parent describes it would be reckless, foolish, and a total disaster. Read the other reply to his comment: the one describing dictators who make those who didn't vote for him "conveniently" disappear. Do you seriously not think that people would be harassed/strongarmed into voting a certain way? "Don't try to lie to us either: we can verify whether or not you voted with us afterward." Did you even think through the proposed system before saying how wonderful it is?
This is a straw man argument.
Any political system can be usurped by force if its participants allow it. The point is not to attempt to create a political system that cannot be usurped by force, but to create a political system that cannot be usurped within its normal operation by guile.
If every member of the population knows what is going on, and they see violent elements in their midst who are attempting to dominate them, they have the choice to all vote for one person, who will organize them to expel the violent elements from the society.
The problem with our current structures is that they are great at centralizing power during time of threat, but they are poor at decentralizing power and giving people greater degrees of autonomy during times of peace, and they are highly suceptable to corruption and misinformation. Such a system as I've described would allow power to flow in and out of central control as societies needs demand and be beyond corruption, and that is key to allowing free people to co-operate. It doesn't release people from the need to be willing to fight for their freedom, nothing can do that.
Also, if they create a public perception that electronic voting is always uniformly opaque, complex and prone to fixing, they prevent direct democracy from ever taking hold and preserve the party system. Which is, of course, something all current and aspiring party politicians can unite behind.
The answer is:
1) To make peoples votes public information so everyone can see them immediately, know where everyone stands, and know if the votes were tampered with.
2) To allow them to directly vote on each issue if they want.
3) To allow them to vote for any person they want, and have that person cast their vote if they're not interested in directly voting on the issues.
4) To allow them to change the person they vote for at any time if they break faith.
You do that, and every person is in control of their own political power. That's the promise of electronic voting done right. I wouldn't think any person who covets power for its own sake is ever going to support something like this though.
Microsoft wanted a standard basically amounts to ISO certified vendor lock in. They wanted it because it supports their business model, which is getting paid for the standard office functionality installed on every computer on earth, forever.
IBM wanted a standard that allows them to mix and match their own office software, MS office software, or any other office software together as part of a larger solution based on their clients needs. They wanted it because it supports their business model, which is doing analysis of a specific businesses needs and helping them put together a complete information infrastructure.
The thing is, the reason the International Standards Body exists is to make IBMs business model practical and prevent companies from successfully operating with Microsofts business model. It doesn't do this because it has a business motive though. It does it because the people of the world value their autonomy enough to have united behind this goal.
So, basically, Microsoft are angrily accusing IBM of being good corporate citizens of the world in this particular regard.
Yeah never mind the fact that Vista has only sold 100 million copies to the end of December and that Microsoft had it's best quarter in history.
Yeah, but how much did they pay the developers to write it? They released XP in October 25, 2001. They released Vista to the public January 30, 2007. That's over five years of paycheques to recoup before they actually start to turn a profit on this release.
Of course, it's the big media companies who paid for Vista. Microsoft saw the writing on the wall, and they sold out their install base. They didn't put the new features in for the benefit of the consumer, they put them in because they hope to get a few points on the dollar from the copyright industries once they've created an infrastructure for total information control. I imagine the US government threw a lot of money in the pot too.
Hopefully, this will all just collapse under its own weight. If it doesn't, eventually, it is going to be necessary to send ground troops after these people and force them to stop what they're doing.
Digital copies aren't a product. They're an advertisement for a performer. They should be treated as such.
Still, it's a huge improvement over the existing situation. As long as we're not paying "per-use" or "per-song", we're still creating a situation where the common person on the street is subtly encouraged to expose themselves to as much culture and knowledge as their time, interest and curiosity allows without a financial disincentive and still supporting our artists. That's the most important thing.
Slashdot Mirror
i've been interested in this question for the last few years. how much do people value the ability to use a relational language and transactional consistency, or for most of these uses are these things just historical artifacts?
In the 7 years I've been working in the industry, I've never delivered a single project that I would trust to a non-ACID database. Ever. And I doubt I ever will. If you want something that will generate some marketing material at high speed, and if it fails, who cares, well, use MySQL. If you want to do something that can handle a million pithy comments and if some of them get lost in the shuffle, who cares, well, that's fine too. Use whatever serves fast. If you're running Google, and it doesn't matter if a node drops out because there is no "right" answer to get wrong in the first place as long as you spit out a bunch of links, well, these sorts of non-resilient systems are fine.
Personally, I've never done projects like that. In my projects, if the data isn't perfect always and forever, it's worse than if it had never been written. It's very existence is a liability, because people will rely on it when they shouldn't, for things that can't get by with "close".
So yes. Transactional consistency and a solid relational model are pretty much mandatory, and not going anywhere soon. The idea that they might be replaced by technology such as this is laughable.
That means your university has been corrupted to the point that you can't even recognize that it was once intended to be a public institution. It has been so polluted with private money, and has so normalized its operations to depend on that private money, that it is unfit to serve the purpose for which it was created. It's just a means of generating more scarcity and leverage now.
'An OS should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying [expletive] about it except the technical people.'
That may be true, but until someone writes open source psychic device drivers, they will continue to be obliged to do so. It's still necessary to tell your OS how to interact with your hardware, and the tools you use to do so are just as important as the kernel.
Instead of cracking the DRM, why not crack their skulls?
Two thumbs up on that idea. I'll bring the rope.
File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster.
Good News: The integrated spyware/trojan horse functionality has seen significant performance enhancements. The overhead imposed on the various systems that this functionality interacts with has been significantly reduced.
But other tests showed little improvement and in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.
Bad News: The spyware/trojan horse functionality has been even more deeply integrated into the operating system. There are more systems than ever whose performance has been negatively affected by these assaults on the user.
At least there's some good news...
He also specifically said his problem was with an agreement he signed that says they "own" everything he writes. I hate smart people not being allowed to build on the ideas they've had, so I rant. It's not like there's anything useful to be said to the guy anyways...
Oh one additional note, you can't version control the entries in a database. This would be another reason why you want the queries separate. When alot of your code (like I illustrated in my previous example) is based upon schemas, you are relying on your data remaining intact and your database not getting corrupted. At least with a versioning control systems you have your backups, your checkouts, your test environments, your tags and your production code.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The whole point of a database is that it uses transaction logging, which gives you a complete play by play of every single change made to the data since it was created when done properly, and allows you to roll backward and forward in time as you see fit.
It's also part of the reason you don't do joins or foreign keys across databases as a rule. They have separate transaction logs, indexes and locking per database, and when you try to violate those bounds, you're breaking the aspects of the database that made it useful in the first place and turning it into a fragile and corruptible mess.
Good version control systems, on the other hand, are made to be broken casually and merged in a resilient fashion. They're made to enter and leave inconsistent states on a regular basis.
You don't have pointy hair by any chance, do you?
That's what you get for signing such a contract. You should never sign such a contract. You should specifically say that you own things you create during your own time, and ideally you should use different technology to develop your private enterprises than what you use for your clients. That way, it is abundantly clear that you didn't copy anything. A two-year non-compete agreement is more than sufficient to protect their interests against you.
If you want to do things on your own time and reuse them at work, or reuse your existing code base to deliver solutions better and faster, grant your employers an unlimited license to use the things for free, charge them through the nose in hourly fees, stipulate that you own any improvements to your code that don't contain their business logic, and abstract their business logic out well during design so your code doesn't get polluted.
If you're a good coder, you have to protect your right to make a living. These big development houses are competing with each other, and if you aren't making them rich, they'd just as soon you weren't allowed to work anymore in the industry. They'll screw you if you let them.
Sounds good to me. The doctor should be charged with premeditated murder for profit and executed by firing squad too.
Stability isnt critical for my applications. Raw speed is however. A decrease in speed would be rather bad.
Memcached?
The world is full of conspiracies. They're all over the place. As a businessman, I'm a conspirator. As someone interested in creating disruptive technologies, I'm a conspirator. Every corporation is an open conspiracy. Conspiracies are everywhere, they're the natural order of our society.
You can say "There are conspiracies behind this, and I'm going to figure them all out", and you never will, and if you do, no one will care. That's one approach.
You can say "There are no conspiracies, the world is simple, there are just co-incidences around, that's all", and if you do, you'll toodle through life with a sense that you know everything that can be known, and what you don't know is unknowable. That's another approach.
The hardest approach is, "There are conspiracies behind this, I can see that they exist in some nebulous form, but I will neither drive myself crazy trying to get to the bottom of it nor will I pretend that the world is the simple thing that my television tells me that it is, I will simply be content to know that these forces are moving with purpose in the world somewhere beyond my sight."
That is the approach that lets you see deeper into the nature of the world without getting obsessed with the trivialities of whose behind it all.
Get what I'm saying?
You miss the point. You are on Slashdot, so must have similar interests to me, even though we never meet. THAT is what they're trying to do. Your opinion is probably more relevant than the "raw" results from Google would ever be 75% of the time.
You clearly didn't read the article. What you are describing, however interesting it might be, is not what this project is doing. What this project is doing is rating things associated with my sister highest, my cousin next, my friends next, my co-workers next, my old school chums next, and the rest of the web last.
From the article:
Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user--such as a public LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom.
This is not intended to inform and give people knowledge that wasn't already at their disposal. It is intended to tempt people with things that they might buy on the assumption that their tastes are similar to their friends. It is not a good thing, unless you're looking to be amused or marketed to.
I disagree.
I think coincidence just means that despite being slapped upside the head with a clue, you still don't understand what's going on. It's one thing to accept that some things are beyond your capacity to ever understand but still exist and move on on that basis, it's another thing to believe that just because you can't see the system, it isn't there.
Coincidences are very often the only hints you get that there is a pattern there, and the best you can do is acknowledge that it exists in some shape and move on with that niggling knowledge resting in your head without either obsessing over it or dismissing it.
If you can do that, you can intuitively anticipate patterns that are beyond your capacity to properly understand.
Calling something a coincidence, on the other hand, is a way of psychologically dismissing it. It's a way of protecting a persons sense of being in control, which is very important to most people.
Maybe in the grand scheme of things, I'm wrong, but I find this perspective on the world empowering, so I'll probably keep it regardless.
Co-incidence is what people call it when they're confronted by something systematic that they aren't able to understand. It doesn't exist.
When you can't find the evidence, you look for motive and capacity. That makes it most likely that this was caused by the western warmongers alliance in an effort to cover up operations, or by the religious leaders within Iran in an effort to isolate their population from "corrupting influence".
In light of the real, visible and ongoing efforts being put forth by Iran to humanize their people in the eyes of the world and counteract the demonizing propaganda put out by the US, it's unlikely that they did this to themselves, even though under different circumstances it would be in character.
It seems pretty obvious that this was caused by the US/UK/Israel alliance as a way to strike at the Islamic countries. Not that it really matters who did it, even if you knew, you still wouldn't have any capacity to hold anyone accountable. What matters to Iran is replacing the old infrastructure with a new one that is less vulnerable and prevent the exploitation of the opportunity this provides their enemies to establish vectors for espionage.
For a lot of people, which do you think would be more useful to them: The critics/reviews all hate this movie/item/type/etc, I won't go see/get/try it. My friends/aquantances/coworkers all like/bought/ this movie/item/thing/etc, I should go see/get/try it.
The advice of critics and strangers, of course. They do not need a search engine to find out what their friends think, they can just talk to them. This strikes me as a way to further estrange people from each other by allowing them to filter out any dissenting views before they should be forced to confront them. Beyond being a dumb idea, it's socially harmful.
Who would want to use a search engine that put the answers from the experts at the bottom and the answers they could easily get by asking their mom or their roommate at the top?
Sounds pretty damned stupid if you ask me.
The countries internet connection is hanging by a thread, and you slashdot their university. Smooth move, asshole.
No, I don't... I haven't seen any competitors to the mafia in ages... there used to be some. Where have they gone? Last time I heard something about fishes, but a fishing trip can't last that long, eh?
Yakusa? They make the mafia look like schoolchildren.
No, what I m saying is that the proposition removes one very important protection: that from voter intimidation.
Historically, that was true. It was possible for a person to intimidate another person with absolutely no evidence.
That is now preventable through technological means in ways that were not possible before.
Therefore, what was once not practical for the reasons you describe is now something that can be considered anew, with consideration given to how those systemic liabilities can be overcome and advantage gained.
Just as an example, a starting point:
If the British can cover entire cities with cameras and have paid staff monitoring them, there is no reason to think we cannot have the data from those cameras redistributed in a fashion that is transparent and impractical to alter after the fact.
It's practical to give every person a personal recorder that can be used in tandem with public recordings to create a body of evidence of the goings on in the world.
That right there goes a long ways towards preventing intimidation of, by and between individuals, and it's not placing people under any more surveillance than they are under already.
You seem to be describing an unrealistic situation. If people were not protected from having their decisions influenced by force, anarchy would be a great way to live. Unfortunately, that would not happen, so systems must be put in place to make things fair and safe.
There is no reason to assume that a direct democracy isn't going to have legal structures to prevent violence just like every other political structure. So what, are you putting forward that only representative democracies are able to do this effectively? If not, then precisely what is your point?
To go through with elections the way the parent describes it would be reckless, foolish, and a total disaster. Read the other reply to his comment: the one describing dictators who make those who didn't vote for him "conveniently" disappear. Do you seriously not think that people would be harassed/strongarmed into voting a certain way? "Don't try to lie to us either: we can verify whether or not you voted with us afterward." Did you even think through the proposed system before saying how wonderful it is?
This is a straw man argument.
Any political system can be usurped by force if its participants allow it. The point is not to attempt to create a political system that cannot be usurped by force, but to create a political system that cannot be usurped within its normal operation by guile.
If every member of the population knows what is going on, and they see violent elements in their midst who are attempting to dominate them, they have the choice to all vote for one person, who will organize them to expel the violent elements from the society.
The problem with our current structures is that they are great at centralizing power during time of threat, but they are poor at decentralizing power and giving people greater degrees of autonomy during times of peace, and they are highly suceptable to corruption and misinformation. Such a system as I've described would allow power to flow in and out of central control as societies needs demand and be beyond corruption, and that is key to allowing free people to co-operate. It doesn't release people from the need to be willing to fight for their freedom, nothing can do that.
Also, if they create a public perception that electronic voting is always uniformly opaque, complex and prone to fixing, they prevent direct democracy from ever taking hold and preserve the party system. Which is, of course, something all current and aspiring party politicians can unite behind.
The answer is:
1) To make peoples votes public information so everyone can see them immediately, know where everyone stands, and know if the votes were tampered with.
2) To allow them to directly vote on each issue if they want.
3) To allow them to vote for any person they want, and have that person cast their vote if they're not interested in directly voting on the issues.
4) To allow them to change the person they vote for at any time if they break faith.
You do that, and every person is in control of their own political power. That's the promise of electronic voting done right. I wouldn't think any person who covets power for its own sake is ever going to support something like this though.
Microsoft wanted a standard basically amounts to ISO certified vendor lock in. They wanted it because it supports their business model, which is getting paid for the standard office functionality installed on every computer on earth, forever.
IBM wanted a standard that allows them to mix and match their own office software, MS office software, or any other office software together as part of a larger solution based on their clients needs. They wanted it because it supports their business model, which is doing analysis of a specific businesses needs and helping them put together a complete information infrastructure.
The thing is, the reason the International Standards Body exists is to make IBMs business model practical and prevent companies from successfully operating with Microsofts business model. It doesn't do this because it has a business motive though. It does it because the people of the world value their autonomy enough to have united behind this goal.
So, basically, Microsoft are angrily accusing IBM of being good corporate citizens of the world in this particular regard.
Yeah never mind the fact that Vista has only sold 100 million copies to the end of December and that Microsoft had it's best quarter in history.
Yeah, but how much did they pay the developers to write it? They released XP in October 25, 2001. They released Vista to the public January 30, 2007. That's over five years of paycheques to recoup before they actually start to turn a profit on this release.
Of course, it's the big media companies who paid for Vista. Microsoft saw the writing on the wall, and they sold out their install base. They didn't put the new features in for the benefit of the consumer, they put them in because they hope to get a few points on the dollar from the copyright industries once they've created an infrastructure for total information control. I imagine the US government threw a lot of money in the pot too.
Hopefully, this will all just collapse under its own weight. If it doesn't, eventually, it is going to be necessary to send ground troops after these people and force them to stop what they're doing.
Digital copies aren't a product. They're an advertisement for a performer. They should be treated as such.
Still, it's a huge improvement over the existing situation. As long as we're not paying "per-use" or "per-song", we're still creating a situation where the common person on the street is subtly encouraged to expose themselves to as much culture and knowledge as their time, interest and curiosity allows without a financial disincentive and still supporting our artists. That's the most important thing.