That's a good question. It reminds me of the episode of Next Generation where Geordi's VISOR (yeah, it's an acronym - stands for Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) causes a subspace disruption because of some odd property of the region of space the Enterprise was traveling through, and Data's positronic brain... actually I forget how it all ended up.
They want to make a show of being just as open as OpenDocument, but not give up complete control over implementation rights (read: patents) for their new MS Office XML formats. In other words, itsatrap. If the world moved to OpenDocument, no one could limit the commercial and noncommercial implementations of the format. Not so with Microsoft's standards, into which their claws are still at least loosely sunk.
As much as people may criticize this, I have to say it's the most useful thing we could possibly do with space technology. I can't think of any better investment the NASA or the ESA could make than safeguarding our future. Going to Mars is, in my opinion, a huge waste of money. But deflecting asteroids that could take out a city, or worse, is worth trillions of dollars in investment - no exaggeration.
Your argument misses the real lesson. This is not a health care problem - plenty of countries have implemented public health care systems and they work fine. (As an immediate aside, I find it intriguing that so many - dare I guess, right wing? - people in the US will argue against the very practicality of public health care when examples of it working exist throughout the world, even in two of the US's two closest allies.)
No, this is not a health care problem. And it's not a big government problem. It's the problem you get when non-technical management have to make technology decisions. That's the lesson from this disaster. After all, that's what government is: management. And like management in any company, they will envision technology solving all their problems but have very little capacity to implement. So pie-in-the-sky projects happen. It's not a government problem; I remember my old boss used to buy all sorts of crummy shrink-wrapped software for his work PC (which he would have me dutifully install for him) and I would then have to endure his complaints when it couldn't do what he envisioned it doing. Management view software as a cure-all, despite their own past experiences.
Your point about "other people's money" is relevant, though. Public health care can work, and public technology projects can probably also work, but there is a real danger when any project has access to seemingly unlimited resources.
Stop drinking the Kool-aid. This was no better a result than the previous crowd staying in control...
Far from true. You rightly point out that the Democrats present us with new challenges, especially those of us who believe in copyright reform (in some respects they may be worse for that issue). But I'm not a one-issue voter. So here are some others:
In times like these foreign policy is far more significant an issue than copyright, and the Repubs made a mess of foreign policy.
Ditto with fiscal policy. We went from 90s 'tax-and-spend' to an entirely new idea: 'spend-and-spend'.
Think you have privacy rights? The right to an attorney? The right to be charged with a crime if you're detained? Basic constitutional rights have been ignored by the executive branch and then (just a couple weeks ago) rolled back by the legislature. Have you read about the US citizen who was tortured yet?
Congressional oversight died at some point in 2001. There has been virtually no oversight over the executive branch by the legislature since Clinton left office. During his terms, Congress logged 140 hours testimony into whether he used the White House Christmas card list to help with fundraising. Compare this to 12 hours of testimony into the Abu Ghraib scandal that helped fuel the Iraqi insurgency. Congress issued 1052 subpoenas for testimony during the Clinton years. It has issued 0 to the Bush White House.
The last item on the list is probably the most important. If I could choose between the president doing whatever he'd like without oversight and having a broadcast flag on my TV signal, I'll take the broadcast flag and feel lucky for it.
Good points, but look at it this way: the IE folks owe everything to Firefox. Really. The fact that their offices no longer smell of mothballs is a direct consequence of Firefox's rise. Microsoft was able to keep an open and evolving cross-platform development platform at bay (i.e., the web), but the fact that their strategic product wasn't a profitable product kept development in the dark ages until Firefox came along. IE will always improve (and indeed, will only improve) if it has this competition. As one of the co-creators of Firefox said recently:
Firefox brought Microsoft back to the table, but they make no guarantees how long they'll stick around. I can't imagine why any individual--let alone an IT department--would bet on a company with a proven track record of gross abandonment.
IE people should be very glad there's a Firefox, and pray it has staying power. And should keep sending cakes to the Mozillers.
You seem to have posted this amusing but irrelevant "story" on Slashdot. Please remove it and resubmit at again digg.com. You might want to alter the title from this:
Creepy Windows XP Halloween mask
To this:
CREEPY XP HW mask!!!!!!!!!!!!! MUST SEE!!!!!
Increase the number of exclamation marks as you see fit, depending on how creepy you feel the mask photo is. You might help your chances of getting the re-submitted post to Digg's main page by using the acronym "OMG" and suggesting that people who don't check out the link are loser's (and yes, you should definitely pluralize it with an apostrophe). Thanks for visiting Slashdot.
I had no issues at first. I gleefully went to a site that required Flash >7 (blackberrypearl.com) and it loaded fine. I right-clicked and saw that the player version in the context menu was 9, which was gratifying. But it otherwise seemed exactly the same.
After I closed that tab I was unable to load any pages in the others. Pressing Enter from the address bar did not cause the contents of the address bar to materialize. In fact nothing happened, not even an error message. I restarted the browser (Windows 98 mentality kicking in here), and that fixed it. But on a subsequent attempt I noticed the same thing again. This time I was able to load Slashdot once, but the CSS was missing. It was the plain white un-positioned fallback version of the site, which was actually interesting to see. It was as if I were using Netscape 3 or something.
Anyone else seeing these things? (I also have no audio, but I suspect I need to review the system requirements to mend that.)
Not at all. I just dropped them an e-mail and asked them to ditch Explorer.exe in favor of KDE, and they said that would be fine and I should see it in the next RC. The FSF has convinced them to include Bash in place of cmd.exe, so that will be a nice improvement, too. I understand their shift from using the NT Kernel32 to Linux might not appear until the final release.
We should probably find an appropriate federal government agency and assign them to keep a regular count of how many Census Bureau laptops have been lost using some sort of mandatory survey, plus provide periodic analysis of the demographics of the laptop users and...
It's only going to get worse for companies like Symantec and Adobe. Building software on the Windows platform brings the advantages of a large market. The disadvantage is that Microsoft is not in the business of creating a platform for developers, they're in the business of selling software licenses. The licenses get sold because people are addicted to the platform, not because people can protect it with Symantec products.
And Adobe's complaints really surprise me. OS X has been able to export anything to PDF - a relatively open format - for years, and I can do the same thing on KDE.
Windows is a shaky foundation to build a business on - albeit a potentially profitable one until Microsoft decides to assimilate your functionality.
As a longtime Linux user I find the whole debate kind of funny. (Anti-flame disclaimer: I don't mean to 'should' or 'shouldn't' anyone regarding their choice of operating system.) It's kind of a stragne scenario, isn't it? In the end, Microsoft will probably put a checkbox in a Control Panel GUI that lets you turn off this sound, or even (if the marketing people can be distracted with something else for long enough) change the sound to something else. At the very least they'll have a Registry setting for it. But in the mean time there's a guy at Microsoft trying to make a decision about whether Windows users should be allowed to turn off a noise their computer makes. A pleasant-sounding noise, to be sure. But the decision is entirely in the hands of a person who, if the marketing people have strong enough control over Vista's brand image, might decide there's nothing Windows users should be allowed to do about it. Short of getting their hands very dirty with a hex editor, that is.
A very foreign idea to me. My current distribution of choice, Ubuntu, has some sounds enabled, and they do add to the brand image. And I do turn them off. And no one, not even the designers at Canonical, can ever tell me that I can't.
This is no problem. We'll be able to desalinate seawater for irrigation as long as we have enough energy for the desalinisation plants. And we'll have plenty of energy for them as a result of all the biofuels we'll generate through our irrigation endeavors. I don't see how anything can go wrong.
This was nice to read. I was in the Red Hat camp for a long time, and am even an RHCE, but I've been fairly devoted to Ubuntu for the past year and a half. The main thing I like is that it comes from a single CD, and the rest is kept in repositories. And that it works so well out of the box. It's good to hear that Fedora is thinking of killing Extras as a separate project and moving to a repository-based system.
Though I'm a bit dismayed by the talk of Fedora Directory Server. A good directory service for managing user accounts (including Samba accounts) is probably one of the biggest wish-list items for sysadmins. I hope they raise its profile in Fedora. It would be a major advantage over Ubuntu on the server side of things.
He's rather adamant about Fedora not being a beta for RH. Personally I was never under the impression that it was a beta of anything (aside from the fact that I found the second release to be rather unstable). RH did a fairly good job of splitting it off by explaining the differences betwen their two main audiences: (a) people who pay and (b) people who want the latest packages.
Correct. It's a bit desperate, really. Some people have pointed out that their goal with this product (and Windows Media Player) is to rule the world of codecs and DRM, which is no doubt true to an extent. But ultimately it's about putting some eggs in other baskets. Face it, after many years of trying to diversify they are still the Windows/Office company. That's a vulnerable position to be in. If they can sell these things like Apple can sell iPods, they'll have their third major success in 30 years.
Of course if selling these things helps them rule the world of codecs and DRM, that also helps to safeguard Windows. So I'm wondering if they'll sell them at a reasonable profit to try to have a third cash cow, or if their two-product survival instinct will hijack the Zune product and lead them to sell it at a loss (as they are doing with the XBox). That would be a bad sign.
... but it's safe to say that legacy AT, PS/2 and USB keyboards with caps lock keys will be around almost forever. No matter how many we destroy once the New Keyboard Revoultion has passed, the old ones will still be around. Gradually CAPS-ONLY apps will go away; it will take far longer for the old keyboards to disappear.
Was it gold and platinum, or is that some kind of error and it's really gold-pressed latinum? I'd imagine it's actually the latter, as that's the twelfth spammer rule of acquisition.
In my 12 years of working on the Internet, no registrar... has caused more wholesale heartache for legitimate customers... They are the biggest bunch of sleazebags... (and) came out of the gate with the intention to defraud, mislead and exploit consumers. Every time I have a client who is using them, my immediate response is, "Oh Fuck!"... There is no worse domain registrar on the planet... If you're a total moron, you use GoDaddy... (M)y many years of trouble and torment from these jerkwads forces me to not even wish upon my worst enemy, the sleaziness that is their operation.
Thanks for that. Here's a feature from that link I really like: Undo Close Tab. I can't think of how many times I've accidentally closed a tab and wished I could get it back.
An article in Information Week mentions that Balthaser was formerly a VP of strategy at Macromedia, so I'm sure they'll be interested in how his employment contract with them affects this patent's ownership and validity. It also mentions that he used Macromedia Flash 3 in the late 1990s, at least two years prior to receiving the patent. If anyone buys this patent from him they'll be up against big players, and it'll be war. And the patent will almost certainly be invalidated. Then again, if anyone is dumb enough to buy it, maybe I should approach them about buying my patent number 4,815,162,342 entitled "A Method for Utilizing and Commercializing a Simultaneously Suspended and Supported Access Route from Manhattan to Brooklyn."
they will have to migrate most of their desktop and notebook computers away from the Windows program of Microsoft, the world's biggest maker of software
Calling Windows a "program" is a bit of an understatement. Remind me again how many gigabytes a minimal install of that program requires, and what OS it runs on.:)
No, the tide is not turning, as the Microsoft FAT patent nonsense has demonstrated. There is much outcry on both sides of the pond about software patents. There are frivolous lawsuits in the US, protests in Europe. And now an EU judge has said that patents shouldn't apply to software. So what? This policy, at least in the US, is not determined by public sentiment, nor by obvious negative experiences with patenting software. It's determined by the Congress, and they are in the pockets of media, technology and pharmaceurical corporations. Jack Abramoff's surrender to the Justice Department, which relates directly to Congressional corruption, will have more impact on the issue of software patents than this EU judge. When the dirty money comes out of Capitol Hill, and only then, will we see software patents disappear.
They had to drop the Pentium name, because it means "five." The first Pentium was the successor to the 486, and Intel decided to drop the numerical identification at least partly because they coudn't trademark it (you can't trademark numbers, IIRC). So the Pentium was the chip that would have been the 586.
The name "Pentium V" or "Pentium 5" would have been a bit silly, so I don't blame them for dropping the name. But I'm very surprised they didn't develop a new brand identity. Do they even have a marketing department at Intel these days? Maybe, given someone else's recent successes in this market, they should just call their new processors "Athlon-compatible.":)
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good question. It reminds me of the episode of Next Generation where Geordi's VISOR (yeah, it's an acronym - stands for Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) causes a subspace disruption because of some odd property of the region of space the Enterprise was traveling through, and Data's positronic brain ... actually I forget how it all ended up.
They want to make a show of being just as open as OpenDocument, but not give up complete control over implementation rights (read: patents) for their new MS Office XML formats. In other words, itsatrap. If the world moved to OpenDocument, no one could limit the commercial and noncommercial implementations of the format. Not so with Microsoft's standards, into which their claws are still at least loosely sunk.
As much as people may criticize this, I have to say it's the most useful thing we could possibly do with space technology. I can't think of any better investment the NASA or the ESA could make than safeguarding our future. Going to Mars is, in my opinion, a huge waste of money. But deflecting asteroids that could take out a city, or worse, is worth trillions of dollars in investment - no exaggeration.
Your argument misses the real lesson. This is not a health care problem - plenty of countries have implemented public health care systems and they work fine. (As an immediate aside, I find it intriguing that so many - dare I guess, right wing? - people in the US will argue against the very practicality of public health care when examples of it working exist throughout the world, even in two of the US's two closest allies.)
No, this is not a health care problem. And it's not a big government problem. It's the problem you get when non-technical management have to make technology decisions. That's the lesson from this disaster. After all, that's what government is: management. And like management in any company, they will envision technology solving all their problems but have very little capacity to implement. So pie-in-the-sky projects happen. It's not a government problem; I remember my old boss used to buy all sorts of crummy shrink-wrapped software for his work PC (which he would have me dutifully install for him) and I would then have to endure his complaints when it couldn't do what he envisioned it doing. Management view software as a cure-all, despite their own past experiences.
Your point about "other people's money" is relevant, though. Public health care can work, and public technology projects can probably also work, but there is a real danger when any project has access to seemingly unlimited resources.
Far from true. You rightly point out that the Democrats present us with new challenges, especially those of us who believe in copyright reform (in some respects they may be worse for that issue). But I'm not a one-issue voter. So here are some others:
The last item on the list is probably the most important. If I could choose between the president doing whatever he'd like without oversight and having a broadcast flag on my TV signal, I'll take the broadcast flag and feel lucky for it.
Good points, but look at it this way: the IE folks owe everything to Firefox. Really. The fact that their offices no longer smell of mothballs is a direct consequence of Firefox's rise. Microsoft was able to keep an open and evolving cross-platform development platform at bay (i.e., the web), but the fact that their strategic product wasn't a profitable product kept development in the dark ages until Firefox came along. IE will always improve (and indeed, will only improve) if it has this competition. As one of the co-creators of Firefox said recently:
IE people should be very glad there's a Firefox, and pray it has staying power. And should keep sending cakes to the Mozillers.
257 in binary is 100000001. Sadly, not a valid mask.
You seem to have posted this amusing but irrelevant "story" on Slashdot. Please remove it and resubmit at again digg.com. You might want to alter the title from this:
To this:
Increase the number of exclamation marks as you see fit, depending on how creepy you feel the mask photo is. You might help your chances of getting the re-submitted post to Digg's main page by using the acronym "OMG" and suggesting that people who don't check out the link are loser's (and yes, you should definitely pluralize it with an apostrophe). Thanks for visiting Slashdot.
I had no issues at first. I gleefully went to a site that required Flash >7 (blackberrypearl.com) and it loaded fine. I right-clicked and saw that the player version in the context menu was 9, which was gratifying. But it otherwise seemed exactly the same.
After I closed that tab I was unable to load any pages in the others. Pressing Enter from the address bar did not cause the contents of the address bar to materialize. In fact nothing happened, not even an error message. I restarted the browser (Windows 98 mentality kicking in here), and that fixed it. But on a subsequent attempt I noticed the same thing again. This time I was able to load Slashdot once, but the CSS was missing. It was the plain white un-positioned fallback version of the site, which was actually interesting to see. It was as if I were using Netscape 3 or something.
Anyone else seeing these things? (I also have no audio, but I suspect I need to review the system requirements to mend that.)
Not at all. I just dropped them an e-mail and asked them to ditch Explorer.exe in favor of KDE, and they said that would be fine and I should see it in the next RC. The FSF has convinced them to include Bash in place of cmd.exe, so that will be a nice improvement, too. I understand their shift from using the NT Kernel32 to Linux might not appear until the final release.
We should probably find an appropriate federal government agency and assign them to keep a regular count of how many Census Bureau laptops have been lost using some sort of mandatory survey, plus provide periodic analysis of the demographics of the laptop users and ...
Oh wait. Never mind.
It's only going to get worse for companies like Symantec and Adobe. Building software on the Windows platform brings the advantages of a large market. The disadvantage is that Microsoft is not in the business of creating a platform for developers, they're in the business of selling software licenses. The licenses get sold because people are addicted to the platform, not because people can protect it with Symantec products.
And Adobe's complaints really surprise me. OS X has been able to export anything to PDF - a relatively open format - for years, and I can do the same thing on KDE.
Windows is a shaky foundation to build a business on - albeit a potentially profitable one until Microsoft decides to assimilate your functionality.
As a longtime Linux user I find the whole debate kind of funny. (Anti-flame disclaimer: I don't mean to 'should' or 'shouldn't' anyone regarding their choice of operating system.) It's kind of a stragne scenario, isn't it? In the end, Microsoft will probably put a checkbox in a Control Panel GUI that lets you turn off this sound, or even (if the marketing people can be distracted with something else for long enough) change the sound to something else. At the very least they'll have a Registry setting for it. But in the mean time there's a guy at Microsoft trying to make a decision about whether Windows users should be allowed to turn off a noise their computer makes. A pleasant-sounding noise, to be sure. But the decision is entirely in the hands of a person who, if the marketing people have strong enough control over Vista's brand image, might decide there's nothing Windows users should be allowed to do about it. Short of getting their hands very dirty with a hex editor, that is.
A very foreign idea to me. My current distribution of choice, Ubuntu, has some sounds enabled, and they do add to the brand image. And I do turn them off. And no one, not even the designers at Canonical, can ever tell me that I can't.
This is no problem. We'll be able to desalinate seawater for irrigation as long as we have enough energy for the desalinisation plants. And we'll have plenty of energy for them as a result of all the biofuels we'll generate through our irrigation endeavors. I don't see how anything can go wrong.
This was nice to read. I was in the Red Hat camp for a long time, and am even an RHCE, but I've been fairly devoted to Ubuntu for the past year and a half. The main thing I like is that it comes from a single CD, and the rest is kept in repositories. And that it works so well out of the box. It's good to hear that Fedora is thinking of killing Extras as a separate project and moving to a repository-based system.
Though I'm a bit dismayed by the talk of Fedora Directory Server. A good directory service for managing user accounts (including Samba accounts) is probably one of the biggest wish-list items for sysadmins. I hope they raise its profile in Fedora. It would be a major advantage over Ubuntu on the server side of things.
He's rather adamant about Fedora not being a beta for RH. Personally I was never under the impression that it was a beta of anything (aside from the fact that I found the second release to be rather unstable). RH did a fairly good job of splitting it off by explaining the differences betwen their two main audiences: (a) people who pay and (b) people who want the latest packages.
Correct. It's a bit desperate, really. Some people have pointed out that their goal with this product (and Windows Media Player) is to rule the world of codecs and DRM, which is no doubt true to an extent. But ultimately it's about putting some eggs in other baskets. Face it, after many years of trying to diversify they are still the Windows/Office company. That's a vulnerable position to be in. If they can sell these things like Apple can sell iPods, they'll have their third major success in 30 years.
Of course if selling these things helps them rule the world of codecs and DRM, that also helps to safeguard Windows. So I'm wondering if they'll sell them at a reasonable profit to try to have a third cash cow, or if their two-product survival instinct will hijack the Zune product and lead them to sell it at a loss (as they are doing with the XBox). That would be a bad sign.
... but it's safe to say that legacy AT, PS/2 and USB keyboards with caps lock keys will be around almost forever. No matter how many we destroy once the New Keyboard Revoultion has passed, the old ones will still be around. Gradually CAPS-ONLY apps will go away; it will take far longer for the old keyboards to disappear.
Was it gold and platinum, or is that some kind of error and it's really gold-pressed latinum? I'd imagine it's actually the latter, as that's the twelfth spammer rule of acquisition.
But, mabu, how do you really feel?
Thanks for that. Here's a feature from that link I really like: Undo Close Tab. I can't think of how many times I've accidentally closed a tab and wished I could get it back.
Dude, the Ides of March is, like, so yesterday.
An article in Information Week mentions that Balthaser was formerly a VP of strategy at Macromedia, so I'm sure they'll be interested in how his employment contract with them affects this patent's ownership and validity. It also mentions that he used Macromedia Flash 3 in the late 1990s, at least two years prior to receiving the patent. If anyone buys this patent from him they'll be up against big players, and it'll be war. And the patent will almost certainly be invalidated. Then again, if anyone is dumb enough to buy it, maybe I should approach them about buying my patent number 4,815,162,342 entitled "A Method for Utilizing and Commercializing a Simultaneously Suspended and Supported Access Route from Manhattan to Brooklyn."
they will have to migrate most of their desktop and notebook computers away from the Windows program of Microsoft, the world's biggest maker of software
Calling Windows a "program" is a bit of an understatement. Remind me again how many gigabytes a minimal install of that program requires, and what OS it runs on. :)
No, the tide is not turning, as the Microsoft FAT patent nonsense has demonstrated. There is much outcry on both sides of the pond about software patents. There are frivolous lawsuits in the US, protests in Europe. And now an EU judge has said that patents shouldn't apply to software. So what? This policy, at least in the US, is not determined by public sentiment, nor by obvious negative experiences with patenting software. It's determined by the Congress, and they are in the pockets of media, technology and pharmaceurical corporations. Jack Abramoff's surrender to the Justice Department, which relates directly to Congressional corruption, will have more impact on the issue of software patents than this EU judge. When the dirty money comes out of Capitol Hill, and only then, will we see software patents disappear.
They had to drop the Pentium name, because it means "five." The first Pentium was the successor to the 486, and Intel decided to drop the numerical identification at least partly because they coudn't trademark it (you can't trademark numbers, IIRC). So the Pentium was the chip that would have been the 586.
The name "Pentium V" or "Pentium 5" would have been a bit silly, so I don't blame them for dropping the name. But I'm very surprised they didn't develop a new brand identity. Do they even have a marketing department at Intel these days? Maybe, given someone else's recent successes in this market, they should just call their new processors "Athlon-compatible." :)