But what happened then? Did they sue? Did they cancel their contract? Or, what I'd rather believe, did they leave it at that?
I'm not sure that's entirely a fair question. I could be wrong, but I'd be surprised if most
tech support roles included tracking things like customer lawsuits and dropped contracts. Maybe if the guy causes the problem, but not if the problem is company policy.
What's the net effect? So they buy stuff, it doesn't work, it pisses them off, they yell at the call center agent... how does that reduce the profit of the company?
Well, that all depends on the timescales involved. We're talking Creative Labs and the sadly oxymoronic "Plays For Sure" platform. In which case, I'd expect that anyone getting that angry about a device probably isn't going to buy a second one from Creative. Which in a world where teenagers absolutely have to have the latest model iPod may prove to be a bit of an own goal to a company trying to carve a chunk of the portable media player market.
Of course, that sort of loss is to point to on a balance sheet. And even if the connection is made, it's unlikely that those who set the policy are going to accept the blame.
But that doesn't mean that the company suffers no ill effects.
how does that reduce the profit of the company? Because that's all that matters.
Presumably you intend that to mean that profits, considered over the shortest possible time-frame, are all that matter to the company? I'd agree with that. Extreme short term thinking is doing tremendous damage to the economic infrastructure all over the western world, so far as I can see.
Yes, YOU don't buy Sony. If it is any consolation for you, neither do I.
I wouldn't exactly describe myself as disconsolate, if that helps any, and I agree that it's unreasonable to expect a multi-billion dollar corporation to crash and burn over a single piece of bad publicity, as damning as this one was.
But I also think it equally unrealistic to assume that because the company still shows a profit, that there are no
negative effects.
But out in the real world? How many know about the rootkit? How many care?
And of those who do, how many are likely to be the next generation of IT managers and CTOs? How much business will Sony lose down the line as a result of this fiasco? And How many of those who know about the rootkit problem are already CTSs for that matter? How many have influence over the purchasing strategies at their workplace?
How does a billion dollar corporation lose its customer base? One buyer at a time
How many follow the logic that no company would DARE to risk bad PR?
To be fair, your assertion was that bad PR has no effect on companies nowadays, not whether companies thought bad PR to be a problem, and certainly not whether or not the general public thought they did.
MS has a record of bad PR, a trail of anti-customer disasters following them for years, yet I don't see them lose their (business) customers in relevant numbers.
Not yet. Businesses are conservative about such things. But only up to a point - or else the business world would still be using IBM almost everywhere.
It's also worth pointing out that a year or two ago, you wouldn't have needed the qualification. You could have said that you didn't see MS losing business anywhere. Yet the days when people queued around the block for the latest MS release would seem to be long gone.
The sad truth is, companies don't care about bad PR anymore
I wonder if they ever did. Maybe it's just getting harder to hid this sort of poor faith trading, and harder to
sweep it all under the carpet. The Internet is changing the rules for everyone. Maybe what you're actually seeing here
is bad PR starting to have a real bit for the first time since the the dawn of the modern corporation.
Well, I'm still not buying Sony, if that helps. They've demonstrated themselves as not to be trusted. If they'll do that to a bloody audio cd, who knows what might lurk in their firmware. That means no Vaio machines anywhere where I have input into the corporate IT strategy, and no PS3 Linux boxes. They've cast serious doubts about their equipment being fit for purpose - so much so that I can't begin to imagine how they'd recover the damage to their reputation.
PS3s sell well, BluRay won the HD war and they're having a record high in profits.
It takes time for understanding of these issues to spread through large bodies of people. And it takes time for that understanding to be reflected in profit margins. I don't think we've seen the end of the Sony Rootkit saga.
As a wise, but thoroughly unpleasant man once said:
Hermann Goering at the Nurenberg trials, according snopes. Sadly any comment on that
is like to get me Godwinned out of the debate. I don't suppose Mussolini said anything similarly helpful? (just kidding, really)
So do you want terrorists to kill you and your family while you sleep in bed?
No. I don't want a meteorite to strike my house while killing everyone while they sleep, either. The odds on both occurrences are, however, extremely small. So far as I can see, neither likelihood is lessened by laws allowing the government to have me detained without evidence for six weeks.
But I think the best reply to this is "won't someone please think of the children"
Do you want your children to grow up in a country where they can be legally held without trial for protracted periods of time. Do you want a country where your loved ones can just disappear if they upset a minister somewhere. All it would take is one of them mouthing off on the wrong
discussion board, after all.
There was Kelvin McKenzie on the radio this morning, saying Rupert Murdoch has suggested that
he stand against David Davis in the bye-election. I thought it very revealing when he said that The Sun supported 42 days, or even 420 days for that matter. And I think that's the crux of the matter. Do we want our loved ones to live in a country which supports detention without trial for an arbitrary period. There are countries in the world where people who upset the government routinely disappear, I know. That was always presented to be as a Bad Thing. somehow it's ok when we do it to ourselves.
We're making the world our children will have to live in, here. I think that's an angle that
warrants wider discussion.
Not to disagree with you, just wanted to point out that this law is not popular in Britain.
Mmmm, I've been wondering about that myself. The beeb keep telling us "surveys" show how this is a popular measure, but
I haven't heard any reference to which surveys, or who it was that commissioned them.
In any event, I'd love to know how the questions were phrased:
Q: Which of the following statements most closely describe your feelings
A:I want to see my children suffer horribly then die before my helpless eyes
B:I think 42 day detention without trial is a stonking good idea, and Gordon Brown a Jolly Good Chap!
Forbid councils, and other government bodies in general, from accessing phone records and email?
Sounds good to me. Then we could make specific exemption for the police if they obtain
a court order. That sounds like a reasonable way to run a society.
Now we have it and can improve on false convictions and you don't want to use it?
I don't know about the GP, but personally, I don't want it used indiscriminately.
I don't want it used casually. I don't want access to this data to be widely available.
Again, allowing the police access with judicial oversight seems perfectly workable and
adequate. I think we can probably manage that without unleashing anarchy upon the world.
No, it doesn't it. The OP asked "Why is it that the *nix users seem to have BSOD issues on an infinitely higher rate than the rest of the world?"
And, if you allow that the word "infinitely" was an obvious and harmless exaggeration,
I've offered one possible explanation that is quite probably true a good many cases.
You are not, of course, required to accept my offered explanation. It would
be nice, however if you were to offer some support for your position. I mean,
beyond repeatedly paraphrasing your original assertion.
And, I don't run anti-virus on one of my WinXP computers and I have yet to get infected. Of course, I don't run around to all the porn/cheat/warez sites and follow safe computing habits.
Unless of course the only answer you're willing to consider is "they're all liars cheats and perverts and therefore
their opinions are worthless". Which, judging by the tone of your reply might well be the case.
If not, you might consider that perhaps not everyone's experience of windows is the same as your own.
Why is it that the *nix users seem to have BSOD issues on an infinitely higher rate than the rest of the world?
I'm guessing that most of them dual boot. In which case, when your windows install picks
up some trojan/downloader, or when the registry gets corrupted, it's very tempting
to say "sod it" and boot back into Linux rather than face the potential hours of work needed
to tackle the problem thoroughly. Of course, if you keep doing that then the windows partition
will get more and more corrupted over time, until even XP will throw bluescreens
on a regualr basis.
Of course, there are lots of windows only users who treat their machines the same way - I've
disinfected one or two of them myself. It's just that these guys tend not to raise the matter on
Windows vs Linux advocacy debates.
My mother got a paralegal cert from a community college. She certainly doesn't dazzle me with her legal acumen.
Quite possibly not. Has she also spent the last five years actively researching legal issues,
finding relevant legislation, leading the analysis of court transcripts and generally seeking
the advice of qualified lawyers with an interest in the relevant fields? Just asking, you know?
But yeah, paralegal training doesn't automatically make you a legal whiz. On the other hand,
a practicing paralegal probably knows more about the law than the average AC on Slashdot.
And, of course, Groklaw does have actual qualified lawyers among its readership, one of whom
I've noticed complaining about the quality of PJ's analysis.
No, no I don't find that at all. What I do find though is that if you look around, the only people who actually care about this whole thing is the open source folks trying to force governments to legislate Office out of existence
Oh, right. So the national standards bodies of four separate nations are composed entirely of
Free Software zealots, and the way we can tell is that they're complaining about the perversion
oft he ISO fast track process. So that wouldn't be circular logic, because...?
Groklaw and it's regulars still insist that "conveyancing" in GPLv3 is actually enforceable. You have to be all kinds of useless at law to believe that.
Ah, so they're useless at law because they don't hold with your favourite untested legal theory.
Does the phrase "confirmation bias" mean anything to you?
While we're on, show me where PJ said this, please. It's most unlike her to state anything as
legally enforceable - she tends to quote the relevant legislation and then say how she thinks
it might be applied.
You may say, just "don't read OOXML stories" and "don't read Microsoft stories" but here at Slashdot that's all there fucking is.
Well, the obvious thing there is don't read Slashdot if the choice of stories offends you so much.
All the same, I'd like to test this particular assertion against the current front page.
Ah, yes. Microsoft have announced plans to discontinue support for the popular Banana protocol and
announced that all post Vista versions of the OS will only us MS-Kumquat. All that stuff about
spreading fungus is clearly FUD spread by astroturfers and MS fanboys in the media. How could I
have been so blind?
The point that's not immediately apparent here is that The Get Out Clause were in fact singing songs with pro MSOOXML lyrics. Whoever would have thunk it?
Now this one actually mentions Microsoft in TFA. Admittedly it's only one sentence, but
that alone should be enough to make the entire articel about Microsoft.
After that, we get this discussion, which obviously is about MSOOXML, then according to my prefs, it's
"Seven Failed Foot-Based Game Controllers" and "A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?" I don't think I need to
take this one any further.
And by the way, I have no idea what moderation to expect on this one. Probably funny though. It amused me, at least.
And if the outcry were limited Slashdot and Groklaw then you might have a point. However, the outcry I'm referring to is that raised by the standards bodies of Denmark, India, Brazil and South Africa. Oh,
and the UKUUG too, although they're just taking the BSA to court rather than protesting the
result.
So, unless you think that Slashdot has somehow unfairly subverted these bodies,
then I think you'll find you're wrong on that one.
As for Groklaw, PJ is a paralegal bu training, and at least two of the Groklaw regulars are are
qualified lawyers, either practicing or retired. So it's kind of hard to see how you come to the conclusion that they know nothing about law.
Although, of course, the closed nature of the proceedings mean that if the process was corrupt,
most people would never have heard about it. Of course, the major difference here is that
the MPEG standard is in fact workable and fit for purpose. I don't think there'd
be nearly the level of outcry if the same were true of OOXML.
Sadly though, one of the side effects of this whole sorry mess is likely to be a far more
critical eye being cast upon other ISO standards, and a far more receptive hearing given to
complaints about abuse of process in other areas. And of course, there's a danger of
other groups being tarred with the same brush if their interactions with ISO are
less than transparent.
I don't think ISO have yet realised what this fiasco has cost them in terms of credibility. Now
I'm beginning to wonder the fallout might extend further than anyone anticipated.
Now the world needs to be looking at clipping the wings of the predator that did the damage, not at sinking the boot into a crippled ISO.
I love the "crippled ISO" image. It almost suggests that if we just shout at Microsoft
and stop saying hurtful things about ISO, why then the organisation will get a chance to heal,
and recover its ethical values, and be a force for good in the world once more.
Sadly, I don't think things work like that.
While I agree about Microsoft, I don't think we can really absolve ISO from all blame.
To do that would be to send a message to the ISO saying "it's OK to be corrupt. No one minds.
Break the rules, stack the deck; they'll just blame the organisation sponsoring
the standard. Get your noses in the trough, boys!"
I agree that the fall of ISO is a tragedy. But until and unless they set their house in order
I don't see how anyone is going to trust them again. Effectively they've just hung out a
shingle saying "For Rent".
At the very least, ISO need to admit that there's a problem here and take steps to both fix the
damage done, and to ensure it doesn't happen again. And that's not going to happen if they feedback
they get "well, I guess that could have happened to anyone".
Your argument is entirely based on the unstated assumption that only the government can provide defensive services.
Naturally some defense is required against those who would employ coercion, but the government doesn't have to get involved.
Interesting. So what are you suggesting here? That private security forces can perform a police role
as well as a publicly funded force? Do you think that we should abolish publicly funded police in favour of
such corporate law enforcement? Or do you think that we should remove the crimes of murder, robbery and extortion
from the statue books, and let the market regulate things?
I'm sorry if that sounds sarcastic, but your post could be interpreted as implying any or all of
those things, and while I'd like to discus this, I'd prefer to address the point you actually wanted to make
There are perfectly viable alternatives which do not involve systematic endorsement of the very coercion we're attempting to counter.
If you're going to make your point work, I think you need to explain what these alternative are and how they work.
Also, coercion by whom, of whom, and by what means. Finally, I'd like to understand how the alternatives
you mention are any different (if they themselves are coercive) or how they will be effective (if non-coercive).
This all sounds quite fascinating. Nutty as a fruit cake, but fascinating nevertheless.
Generally, whatever makes the most money is most beneficial to the people when there is no gov't interference in the market place.
You know, I could make a ton of money if I wanted to - just stand in a busy shopping street with a handgun and demand money from passers-by. Anyone causes trouble, I could just shoot them. It's
just the governments unwarranted interference with a free market that stops me. If they didn't make
murder, robbery and extortion illegal, then I could clean up.
That's the trouble with taking free market politics too religiously. You need a certain amount of
government interference to establish the marketplace in the first place. Otherwise, the guys with the
biggest clubs and the flimsiest morals just go around raping everyone they meet, and then boast about it in interviews with Fortune magazine.
Of course this piece of regulation will be different than all the others.
I think every piece of regulation is different from all the others.
We have weights and measures laws, because merchants used to routinely
cheat their customers, boosting their short term finances to the detriment
of the economic system as a whole We have regulations about what you can
put in foodstuffs, because unscrupulous vendors have shown a willingness
to boost their profit by using ingredients that are addictive, toxic,
or both.
It seems a dangerous oversimplification to say that all government
regulation is harmful, just as it seems equally foolish to claim that
regulation is
always beneficial. I think we have to consider each proposal on its merits.
VOIP might be a reasonable case for prioritising a single protocol, but unless the bill spells specifically states VOIP and nothing else, then it seems likely that the telcos will continue as
they are now, and claim each instance of throttling is allowed under the "reasonable cases"
provision.
Hence the question - who decides what's a reasonable case? You clearly have your opinion,
the ISPs will almost certainly have a different one, their customers are likely to have yet another,
and the opinion that matters will likely end up being that of a judge - which may or may not reflect
the intent of the bill. If the author had listed specific cases then this bill might have some value.
As it is, it stands an evens chance of enshrining into law the ISPs right to tamper and throttle to their hearts' content.
The point is that for once someone (well, a group of people) is finally taking notice to an issue that has been around for a while. I know it's slashdot, but please... grow up.
I don't think "who decides what is reasonable" a particularly childish question. Rather, it
cuts to the core of the matter: if this bill is to achieve its apparently purpose,
then which cases are and are not reasonable need to be specified with far greater precision.
I agree with Gates, Win95 was as good as Windows got. No, I'm not Bill Gate's sockpupet.
Actually, from Bill's viewpoint, Win95 really was as good as it got. Remember, Bill's a marketer, not a techie. W95 had iPhone style queues of people waiting to buy the new OS. Here in the UK they reported how the first customer to buy a copy got handed a phone so Bill could talk to him, personally. People were excited by the release. They wanted to use it.
It really was a triumph of marketing.
The trouble lay in the aftermath. Outside the hype zone, people quickly discovered that their existing systems weren't powerful enough to run the OS and that their existing software ran either much slower, or not at all - thus setting the pattern for future Windows releases. Of course, once you'd spent the additional money on a new computer, and new versions of the programs you used, there's no question that Win95 was in a great many ways superior to 3.1.1.
But I don't think MS have since enjoyed that level of public trust.
No wonder Bill sees it as a high point. Happier times for Microsoft all round.
Of course the drivers and software that run on vista are going to run on Windows 7. Clearly, all they're going to do is rebrand Vista, change some eye candy, and pray it sells thistime around!
They'd be doing it now, but they need to wait long enough that people will believe they've done some actual work on it.
Seriously, the smart bet seems to be that event was caused by an asteroid strike. But until someone
gathers some hard data, that's still only a hypothesis.
What self respecting scientist wouldn't go and examine the evidence? Because if it wasn't an asteroid strike...
Oh, I don't dispute that naive users can always compromise a system. But I don't think that
all of Microsoft's security woes can be laid at the door of such users, any more than
I buy the story that all Windows' stability issues arise from bad third party device drivers.
Moreover, I don't buy the underlying assumption, that security is an absolute, and that
all systems that are capable of being compromised are equally insecure.
No need to slam Vista (or Windows in general) -- the problem is combining a dumb user with/any/ OS he can get admin rights on.
I don't think that works as an excuse for Microsoft.
The trouble with that Windows is supposed to be the operating system of the common man. At least,
every time Linux gets a cool feature, the Redmond apologists start roll out their hypothetical
Joe Sixpacks and Great Aunt Mildreds and tell us how these ordinary people can never cope with Linux, but windows, focus-grouped to death as it is, has been designed for these exemplars of non-geekiness, and is therefore superior.
But that makes it kind of hard to blame bad security on the users. Windows is supposed to be designed with the click-on-the-dancing-monkey demographic in mind. They can't really throw their hands in the air and say "it's not us, it's the stupid users" without admitting that, really, they haven't a clue how to make a secure operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that's entirely a fair question. I could be wrong, but I'd be surprised if most tech support roles included tracking things like customer lawsuits and dropped contracts. Maybe if the guy causes the problem, but not if the problem is company policy.
Well, that all depends on the timescales involved. We're talking Creative Labs and the sadly oxymoronic "Plays For Sure" platform. In which case, I'd expect that anyone getting that angry about a device probably isn't going to buy a second one from Creative. Which in a world where teenagers absolutely have to have the latest model iPod may prove to be a bit of an own goal to a company trying to carve a chunk of the portable media player market.
Of course, that sort of loss is to point to on a balance sheet. And even if the connection is made, it's unlikely that those who set the policy are going to accept the blame. But that doesn't mean that the company suffers no ill effects.
Presumably you intend that to mean that profits, considered over the shortest possible time-frame, are all that matter to the company? I'd agree with that. Extreme short term thinking is doing tremendous damage to the economic infrastructure all over the western world, so far as I can see.
I wouldn't exactly describe myself as disconsolate, if that helps any, and I agree that it's unreasonable to expect a multi-billion dollar corporation to crash and burn over a single piece of bad publicity, as damning as this one was. But I also think it equally unrealistic to assume that because the company still shows a profit, that there are no negative effects.
And of those who do, how many are likely to be the next generation of IT managers and CTOs? How much business will Sony lose down the line as a result of this fiasco? And How many of those who know about the rootkit problem are already CTSs for that matter? How many have influence over the purchasing strategies at their workplace?
How does a billion dollar corporation lose its customer base? One buyer at a time
To be fair, your assertion was that bad PR has no effect on companies nowadays, not whether companies thought bad PR to be a problem, and certainly not whether or not the general public thought they did.
Not yet. Businesses are conservative about such things. But only up to a point - or else the business world would still be using IBM almost everywhere.
It's also worth pointing out that a year or two ago, you wouldn't have needed the qualification. You could have said that you didn't see MS losing business anywhere. Yet the days when people queued around the block for the latest MS release would seem to be long gone.
I wonder if they ever did. Maybe it's just getting harder to hid this sort of poor faith trading, and harder to sweep it all under the carpet. The Internet is changing the rules for everyone. Maybe what you're actually seeing here is bad PR starting to have a real bit for the first time since the the dawn of the modern corporation.
I find that thought rather cheering, myself :)
Well, I'm still not buying Sony, if that helps. They've demonstrated themselves as not to be trusted. If they'll do that to a bloody audio cd, who knows what might lurk in their firmware. That means no Vaio machines anywhere where I have input into the corporate IT strategy, and no PS3 Linux boxes. They've cast serious doubts about their equipment being fit for purpose - so much so that I can't begin to imagine how they'd recover the damage to their reputation.
It takes time for understanding of these issues to spread through large bodies of people. And it takes time for that understanding to be reflected in profit margins. I don't think we've seen the end of the Sony Rootkit saga.
Hermann Goering at the Nurenberg trials, according snopes. Sadly any comment on that is like to get me Godwinned out of the debate. I don't suppose Mussolini said anything similarly helpful? (just kidding, really)
No. I don't want a meteorite to strike my house while killing everyone while they sleep, either. The odds on both occurrences are, however, extremely small. So far as I can see, neither likelihood is lessened by laws allowing the government to have me detained without evidence for six weeks.
But I think the best reply to this is "won't someone please think of the children"
Do you want your children to grow up in a country where they can be legally held without trial for protracted periods of time. Do you want a country where your loved ones can just disappear if they upset a minister somewhere. All it would take is one of them mouthing off on the wrong discussion board, after all.
There was Kelvin McKenzie on the radio this morning, saying Rupert Murdoch has suggested that he stand against David Davis in the bye-election. I thought it very revealing when he said that The Sun supported 42 days, or even 420 days for that matter. And I think that's the crux of the matter. Do we want our loved ones to live in a country which supports detention without trial for an arbitrary period. There are countries in the world where people who upset the government routinely disappear, I know. That was always presented to be as a Bad Thing. somehow it's ok when we do it to ourselves.
We're making the world our children will have to live in, here. I think that's an angle that warrants wider discussion.
Mmmm, I've been wondering about that myself. The beeb keep telling us "surveys" show how this is a popular measure, but I haven't heard any reference to which surveys, or who it was that commissioned them.
In any event, I'd love to know how the questions were phrased:
Something like that, I'll bet you....
Sounds good to me. Then we could make specific exemption for the police if they obtain a court order. That sounds like a reasonable way to run a society.
I don't know about the GP, but personally, I don't want it used indiscriminately. I don't want it used casually. I don't want access to this data to be widely available. Again, allowing the police access with judicial oversight seems perfectly workable and adequate. I think we can probably manage that without unleashing anarchy upon the world.
And, if you allow that the word "infinitely" was an obvious and harmless exaggeration, I've offered one possible explanation that is quite probably true a good many cases.
You are not, of course, required to accept my offered explanation. It would be nice, however if you were to offer some support for your position. I mean, beyond repeatedly paraphrasing your original assertion.
Yes it does...
Unless of course the only answer you're willing to consider is "they're all liars cheats and perverts and therefore their opinions are worthless". Which, judging by the tone of your reply might well be the case.
If not, you might consider that perhaps not everyone's experience of windows is the same as your own.
Or, as Bill prefers to phrase it, "trying to avoid another anti-trust litigation" ;)
I'm guessing that most of them dual boot. In which case, when your windows install picks up some trojan/downloader, or when the registry gets corrupted, it's very tempting to say "sod it" and boot back into Linux rather than face the potential hours of work needed to tackle the problem thoroughly. Of course, if you keep doing that then the windows partition will get more and more corrupted over time, until even XP will throw bluescreens on a regualr basis.
Of course, there are lots of windows only users who treat their machines the same way - I've disinfected one or two of them myself. It's just that these guys tend not to raise the matter on Windows vs Linux advocacy debates.
Quite possibly not. Has she also spent the last five years actively researching legal issues, finding relevant legislation, leading the analysis of court transcripts and generally seeking the advice of qualified lawyers with an interest in the relevant fields? Just asking, you know?
But yeah, paralegal training doesn't automatically make you a legal whiz. On the other hand, a practicing paralegal probably knows more about the law than the average AC on Slashdot. And, of course, Groklaw does have actual qualified lawyers among its readership, one of whom I've noticed complaining about the quality of PJ's analysis.
Oh, right. So the national standards bodies of four separate nations are composed entirely of Free Software zealots, and the way we can tell is that they're complaining about the perversion oft he ISO fast track process. So that wouldn't be circular logic, because...?
Ah, so they're useless at law because they don't hold with your favourite untested legal theory. Does the phrase "confirmation bias" mean anything to you?
While we're on, show me where PJ said this, please. It's most unlike her to state anything as legally enforceable - she tends to quote the relevant legislation and then say how she thinks it might be applied.
Well, the obvious thing there is don't read Slashdot if the choice of stories offends you so much. All the same, I'd like to test this particular assertion against the current front page.
Bye Bye Bananas
Ah, yes. Microsoft have announced plans to discontinue support for the popular Banana protocol and announced that all post Vista versions of the OS will only us MS-Kumquat. All that stuff about spreading fungus is clearly FUD spread by astroturfers and MS fanboys in the media. How could I have been so blind?
An Imaginative Use For CCTVs
The point that's not immediately apparent here is that The Get Out Clause were in fact singing songs with pro MSOOXML lyrics. Whoever would have thunk it?
China's All Seeing Eye
Now this one actually mentions Microsoft in TFA. Admittedly it's only one sentence, but that alone should be enough to make the entire articel about Microsoft.
After that, we get this discussion, which obviously is about MSOOXML, then according to my prefs, it's "Seven Failed Foot-Based Game Controllers" and "A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?" I don't think I need to take this one any further.
What can I say? You made me laugh.
And if the outcry were limited Slashdot and Groklaw then you might have a point. However, the outcry I'm referring to is that raised by the standards bodies of Denmark, India, Brazil and South Africa. Oh, and the UKUUG too, although they're just taking the BSA to court rather than protesting the result.
So, unless you think that Slashdot has somehow unfairly subverted these bodies, then I think you'll find you're wrong on that one.
As for Groklaw, PJ is a paralegal bu training, and at least two of the Groklaw regulars are are qualified lawyers, either practicing or retired. So it's kind of hard to see how you come to the conclusion that they know nothing about law.
Hmm... Not doing very well, are we?
Although, of course, the closed nature of the proceedings mean that if the process was corrupt, most people would never have heard about it. Of course, the major difference here is that the MPEG standard is in fact workable and fit for purpose. I don't think there'd be nearly the level of outcry if the same were true of OOXML.
Sadly though, one of the side effects of this whole sorry mess is likely to be a far more critical eye being cast upon other ISO standards, and a far more receptive hearing given to complaints about abuse of process in other areas. And of course, there's a danger of other groups being tarred with the same brush if their interactions with ISO are less than transparent.
I don't think ISO have yet realised what this fiasco has cost them in terms of credibility. Now I'm beginning to wonder the fallout might extend further than anyone anticipated.
I love the "crippled ISO" image. It almost suggests that if we just shout at Microsoft and stop saying hurtful things about ISO, why then the organisation will get a chance to heal, and recover its ethical values, and be a force for good in the world once more.
Sadly, I don't think things work like that.
While I agree about Microsoft, I don't think we can really absolve ISO from all blame. To do that would be to send a message to the ISO saying "it's OK to be corrupt. No one minds. Break the rules, stack the deck; they'll just blame the organisation sponsoring the standard. Get your noses in the trough, boys!"
I agree that the fall of ISO is a tragedy. But until and unless they set their house in order I don't see how anyone is going to trust them again. Effectively they've just hung out a shingle saying "For Rent".
At the very least, ISO need to admit that there's a problem here and take steps to both fix the damage done, and to ensure it doesn't happen again. And that's not going to happen if they feedback they get "well, I guess that could have happened to anyone".
Interesting. So what are you suggesting here? That private security forces can perform a police role as well as a publicly funded force? Do you think that we should abolish publicly funded police in favour of such corporate law enforcement? Or do you think that we should remove the crimes of murder, robbery and extortion from the statue books, and let the market regulate things?
I'm sorry if that sounds sarcastic, but your post could be interpreted as implying any or all of those things, and while I'd like to discus this, I'd prefer to address the point you actually wanted to make
If you're going to make your point work, I think you need to explain what these alternative are and how they work. Also, coercion by whom, of whom, and by what means. Finally, I'd like to understand how the alternatives you mention are any different (if they themselves are coercive) or how they will be effective (if non-coercive).
This all sounds quite fascinating. Nutty as a fruit cake, but fascinating nevertheless.
You know, I could make a ton of money if I wanted to - just stand in a busy shopping street with a handgun and demand money from passers-by. Anyone causes trouble, I could just shoot them. It's just the governments unwarranted interference with a free market that stops me. If they didn't make murder, robbery and extortion illegal, then I could clean up.
That's the trouble with taking free market politics too religiously. You need a certain amount of government interference to establish the marketplace in the first place. Otherwise, the guys with the biggest clubs and the flimsiest morals just go around raping everyone they meet, and then boast about it in interviews with Fortune magazine.
I think every piece of regulation is different from all the others. We have weights and measures laws, because merchants used to routinely cheat their customers, boosting their short term finances to the detriment of the economic system as a whole We have regulations about what you can put in foodstuffs, because unscrupulous vendors have shown a willingness to boost their profit by using ingredients that are addictive, toxic, or both.
It seems a dangerous oversimplification to say that all government regulation is harmful, just as it seems equally foolish to claim that regulation is always beneficial. I think we have to consider each proposal on its merits.
VOIP might be a reasonable case for prioritising a single protocol, but unless the bill spells specifically states VOIP and nothing else, then it seems likely that the telcos will continue as they are now, and claim each instance of throttling is allowed under the "reasonable cases" provision.
Hence the question - who decides what's a reasonable case? You clearly have your opinion, the ISPs will almost certainly have a different one, their customers are likely to have yet another, and the opinion that matters will likely end up being that of a judge - which may or may not reflect the intent of the bill. If the author had listed specific cases then this bill might have some value. As it is, it stands an evens chance of enshrining into law the ISPs right to tamper and throttle to their hearts' content.
I don't think "who decides what is reasonable" a particularly childish question. Rather, it cuts to the core of the matter: if this bill is to achieve its apparently purpose, then which cases are and are not reasonable need to be specified with far greater precision.
Actually, from Bill's viewpoint, Win95 really was as good as it got. Remember, Bill's a marketer, not a techie. W95 had iPhone style queues of people waiting to buy the new OS. Here in the UK they reported how the first customer to buy a copy got handed a phone so Bill could talk to him, personally. People were excited by the release. They wanted to use it.
It really was a triumph of marketing.
The trouble lay in the aftermath. Outside the hype zone, people quickly discovered that their existing systems weren't powerful enough to run the OS and that their existing software ran either much slower, or not at all - thus setting the pattern for future Windows releases. Of course, once you'd spent the additional money on a new computer, and new versions of the programs you used, there's no question that Win95 was in a great many ways superior to 3.1.1. But I don't think MS have since enjoyed that level of public trust.
No wonder Bill sees it as a high point. Happier times for Microsoft all round.
Of course the drivers and software that run on vista are going to run on Windows 7. Clearly, all they're going to do is rebrand Vista, change some eye candy, and pray it sells thistime around!
They'd be doing it now, but they need to wait long enough that people will believe they've done some actual work on it.
Seriously, the smart bet seems to be that event was caused by an asteroid strike. But until someone gathers some hard data, that's still only a hypothesis.
What self respecting scientist wouldn't go and examine the evidence? Because if it wasn't an asteroid strike...
whoops, left the "/" off when I closed the bold tag. sorry about that.
Oh, I don't dispute that naive users can always compromise a system. But I don't think that all of Microsoft's security woes can be laid at the door of such users, any more than I buy the story that all Windows' stability issues arise from bad third party device drivers.
Moreover, I don't buy the underlying assumption, that security is an absolute, and that all systems that are capable of being compromised are equally insecure.
Well, that's not an opinion I share, obviously.
But even if I did - I still don't see how that would Vista off the hook in terms of security.
I don't think that works as an excuse for Microsoft.
The trouble with that Windows is supposed to be the operating system of the common man. At least, every time Linux gets a cool feature, the Redmond apologists start roll out their hypothetical Joe Sixpacks and Great Aunt Mildreds and tell us how these ordinary people can never cope with Linux, but windows, focus-grouped to death as it is, has been designed for these exemplars of non-geekiness, and is therefore superior.
But that makes it kind of hard to blame bad security on the users. Windows is supposed to be designed with the click-on-the-dancing-monkey demographic in mind. They can't really throw their hands in the air and say "it's not us, it's the stupid users" without admitting that, really, they haven't a clue how to make a secure operating system.