I think the traditional mass media has done plenty to damage their own credibility. Why blame the internet?
Their credibility was an aberration to begin with, and really only came about because of big business got in bed with big government during the 1920s. The syndicates, naturally, wanted to get stories ahead of the smaller papers and came to a cozy agreement with politicians not to say anything too outrageous. The politicians were only too happy to comply, and this pushed the smaller, noisier papers to covering local matters. The syndicates were able to promote themselves as being the voice of authority, the peak of which came with Walter Cronkite.
This is yet another story about something we've heard a million times over, but they put "Internet!" in the title and treat it as though it's novel.
"Birtherism" isn't new, nor limited to black presidents. There was a long argument over whether McCain was native born, there were even debates about whether George W Bush was native born, and have been about presidents going way back. Even recently there was a huge amount of discussion over whether Sarah Palin was really Trig's mother. Even after multiple journalists reported that they had seen her pregnant belly, other equally prominent journalists were still Just Asking Questions.
And birtherism is loopy, but nothing compared to trutherism. About one third of Democrats believed that the government intentionally killed its own citizens to start a wars or, at least, that Bush knew about 9/11 and let it happen. Most Democrats also still claim that W was AWOL from his guard duty, and many prominent figures demanded explanations. CBS's Dan Rather, a 40 year veteran reporter, completely destroyed his career trying to pass off some forged documents. To this day, the guy insists that those forgeries were "fake but accurate". And, of course, there are long standing conspiracy theories about the Bush family's involvement with Nazis and such.
This gets play because "ooh, look, the Internet!" but if you look at what various conspiracies have in common, they're all old fashioned fishing expeditions. After Obama presented the long form, Trump *instantly* went to demanding his college records. The weird Palin birthers want all sorts of hospital records. The AWOL Bush people had huge lists of demands.
All these demands seek to scrutinize every possible second of a person's life. What happens when it's put into practice is the unbounded, independent prosecutor. Ken Starr, for instance, started out by investigating serious claims of corruption by the Clintons. When that turned up nothing, it morphed into a fishing expedition that turned up Lewinsky, Jones and Flowers. Incidentally, there are Clinton obsessives who are still Just Asking Questions, I won't link to it, but do a search for the "Clinton Death List" if you're curious to see some real crazy.
If we heard that a United States General had been captured, crucified, and fed to rats, would that soothe the average American or aggravate him? Would he be more or less likely to support violent retribution or volunteer to fight?
Trumpeting a triumph in victory against our foes is all well and good, but purposeful desecration of the body? We're better than that. A slap in the face against deeply conditioned religious beliefs? I would hope we're smarter than that.
They've already given him a burial at sea in accordance with Islamic traditions.
I pity the folks who, upon visiting a major website, have to wade through 10 dialogs where each more or less thoroughly tries to explain them the particular meaning of their "SC=" cookie and why they feel it is paramount for them to send it. It's suicide for both the user and the website.
That's certainly the reason no one ever turned on cookie checking, but it's fine to tentatively accept a cookie and then delete it later. After all, it's not like I care that a site knows that I just visited it, after all, that's in their server logs anyway.
If you did that, and the cookies were were displayed all at once for the page, it wouldn't be so bad. All you need then is a summary of where elements (cookies, images, flash, scripts) came from on the page, ideally with categories or descriptions looked up from a privacy advocate. You can crowdsource all that work anyway.
This is basically what AdBlock does anyway, only it's simply deleting stuff categorized as "ads".
The GP isn't an ad hominem. Spolsky is arguing from his authority as a successful entrepreneur, so it's perfectly reasonable to call him on that note.
Especially since that and "Microsoft and Google do it, too" is pretty much his entire argument.
By the way, Joel also runs stackoverflow.com, which is huge.
It's big, though stackexchange hasn't taken off similarly, so while it's a good trick, it's still one trick. I'm sure he's certainly making a good amount of money, but since they're (to my knowledge) an unlisted company, it's impossible to say how much.
(and Hollywood ends up filming because it's realized the audience is incapable of spending money on original ideas, but really, they're only doing that because of market research, so it's the same dopes who send in their unoriginal ideas who are demanding and paying to see movies with those unoriginal ideas; it's all perfectly logical, and artless).
You're being unduly critical of the audience.
The reason Hollywood films are bland and derivative is because Hollywood makes blockbusters. A blockbuster might gross, say, $70 million. Now, that gross is from selling tickets at $7 a pop, meaning that they had to convince 10 million people to agree on what would be entertaining to watch.
If Hollywood was willing to make a movie that appealed to just one tenth the number of people, they could do far more novel stuff. But, they're in it for the money, and so they don't.
There are plenty of smaller studios that do interesting films, and occasionally those films catch on with a wider audience. The biggest for the smaller studios is that they don't have the connections and don't get the corporate welfare that the big Hollywood studios do.
.FACT... is trivial... with a wealth of... is easy... will NOT get infected...
Those are three opinions, and one guarantee, none of which are facts.
..FACT.. Talk to ANYONE...
That's conventional wisdom, not a fact.
..FACT...Linux without IT personnel IS WORTHLESS.
That's an estimation of worth, not a fact.
..FACT...When Linux becomes a big enough target...
That's a prediction, not a fact.
So your entire argument is based around several fallacies.
Nope, none of them were fallacies, they're all false assertions.
... this econ 101 question "What am I doing wrong, that my competitors are doing right?"
Econ 101 is about microeconomic equilibria, such as opportunity cost, supply and demand, etc. Your question sounds like some kind of management seminar.
RH have annual revenue of just under $1 billion. That's enough for any company.
What a stupid, fatuous remark.
So, when you're trying to retire, how is your 401K going to make any money if half the companies in it just decide, "yeah, we've made enough, we're just going to hold what we've got?"
Or, if you were a customer, how would you feel if they said, "nope, we've got enough business, sorry."
Or, if you were looking for a job and they tell you, "nope, no positions available, we're not expanding any more."
Oh, right, you'd be balling your eyes out at the unfairness of it all.
CentOS what??? CentOS was created by an individual who's organization (a library IIRC) couldn't afford RHEL. Take off the tinfoil hat, step outside, and take a nice deep breath. Not every company can afford $799 per server per year. That's the minimum you can purchase and still get actual help.
Bullshit. $800 a year is a drop in the bucket compared to the salaries of the users + the salary of the IT support.
And everyone assumes non-profits are doing everything for the good of humanity, newsflash for you naive idiots: they're run by assholes who want to cut corners and enrich themselves just like everything else. The library that "couldn't afford" to spend $800 just shuffled it into a greedy manager's pay.
AT&T's data appears to be wholely corrupted. Some days, AT&T will under-report my data usage by as much as 91%. (They said I used 92 meg, my firewall says I used 1.1 Gigs.) Some days, AT&T will over-report my data usage by as much as 4700%. (They said I used 3.8 Gig, dd-wrt says I used 80 meg. And no, this day wasn't anywhere near the day they under-reported.)
And another speculates:
Another user in the thread suggests that the discrepancy is because AT&T is measuring usage at the DSLAM, thereby creating unrealistic totals that incorporate PPPoE and ATM overhead
And we're taking that as gospel? AT&T needs to get off their asses and answer the questions, but so far we've got nothing to go on.
The speculation brings up a valid point, though. The government could actually be useful here by working out common overhead amounts for various types of services, or a test suite that the service (or a subscriber) could run. Essentially, if I'm using a cable modem, and I download a one gigabyte file, the meter might internally read 1.1 gb of usage, but would use a known ratio to estimate the actual application layer usage.
All that boilerplate is directly because Java has no templates. (I like Java's generics, they did generics right, but generics aren't templates.) And C++ templates could be awesome, but they are so painful to use.
Scheme is great. Code and data are the same structure, and any time you need a new language feature, you just write a macro and, blam, the language does what you want, no BS. I'd only use it over LISP because the Scheme community seems to be more active, especially with new flavors like Rocket.
The other language that's promising right now is Haskell, since it has beautifully simple but powerful syntax, and incredible type system, and ghc has an awesome template system that will hopefully be part of the core language before too long.
Subverting governments: They paid people who should represent the government to instead represent Microsoft in the standards body. It might or might not have been illegal, but it subverted the government's interests.
Most standards are industry standards. So you've got a bunch of companies jockeying to have their way of doing things become the standard. Sometimes MS was successful, other times they weren't. Are you really going to claim that they're less ethical than a company like Sony?
Of the standards that serve government interests directly, such as defense standards, I can't think of any MS was involved in. (But, big company, so I'm sure they were.)
Having worked around government for a few years myself, I can tell you that generally contractors care way more about doing the right thing than the government folks. After all, if the project is successful, they get another contract.
Monopoly: They had been tried and convicted under US law and they have managed to reduce their penalty largely through bribes, but they still were convicted. Nobody ever disputed the facts of the case or ruling under the law, only the size of the punishment.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend that their entire defense never happened, so the facts as the judge found them are absolutely what happened. What was it they did that was more unethical than their competitors?
Breaking contracts, while potentially not illegal is certainly unethical. And that should be the standard to judge their acts in this case.
No, the standard is, based on TFA, the behavior of their competitors.
And I'll assume you meant deliberately breaking contracts, since every software company ever founded would have to be put in prison for life if missing a deadline or going over budget was unethical.
I'd be pretty surprised if MS has ever deliberately broken a contract, since they wouldn't deliberately sign a contract that won't make money, so they don't have much motivation to break them.
Paying trolls like you or Forbes to defend their actions as ethical is quite funny.
Can't speak for Forbes, but I suspect they don't need to be paid to write an article that's guaranteed to start a flamewar. And my history of posts is up there for anyone to see.
It's depressing when everyone is forced to use shitty MS software and when I have to use it at work and curse because nothing ever fucking works. It's depressing that I just went to a job interview, and even though I wasn't pushing hard because I have a job, I was still annoyed that all they cared about was how little Java I had done recently. Motherfucker please, the guy who has coded in Java for 10 years is a shitty programmer who will fall apart if he gets outside his comfort zone. But that's what they want: everyone is his little box using the standard tools to do the standard jobs, complete conformity.
But the people who hate MS are even more conformist; they don't even think about what they're saying or why, it's just a kneejerk reaction. This whole discussion has been a two minutes hate, and anyone who doesn't conform must be being paid by the vast shadowy network of MS trolls. What the fuck ever.
Let me start off by saying that I think ethics are something individuals do. Any group, whether it's a church or a union or a corporation, might have good people, but the thing itself isn't ethical. And all the corporate "social responsibility" is bullshit, and the greenwashing is obviously bullshit.
But I think MS gets a bad rap, and, no, I don't like their products.
I do not think it means what you think it means. For a convicted monopolist with a track record of betraying their partners, subverting governments and standards bodies, and all around ruthless behavior to make the list, I wonder if the word 'ethical' means something to them other than what my dictionary says it does. Oddly enough Google, with their 'don't be evil' motto, doesn't seem to have made the list. I know they have committed their share of sins over the years, but it seems that what they have done so far does not hold a candle to even what Microsoft has done over the last decade.
Okay, this is a pretty good summary of the things/.ers love to hate about MS.
Monopolist: they developed the dominant OS, and used that influence in a way that their competitors thought was unfair.
"Betraying" their partners: again, MS's competitors whining about unfairness.
Subverting governments: you mean they broke laws? In that case, which ones?
Subverting standards bodies: by which you mean they didn't write code the way a committee preferred.
Ruthless behavior: this really deserves a paragraph.
The ruthlessness of MS is what really gets people, because it plays into the stereotypical stovepipe hatted capitalist.
But what I see when I look back at all the companies during the PC era (from DOS to Win 95, more or less) is that everyone talked tough. Everyone wanted to dominate the market and make everyone else buy their stuff. And when MS outmaneuvered them, they all started crying. Even then, the "maneuvering" these companies did was BS. Really, there was squabbling and politics, but what sank companies was and is poor business decisions. MS made their share of bad decisions, but they were never bad enough to sink them. All the maneuvering and sensational headlines rarely amounted to any real world impact.
A good non-MS example: look at the whole SCO-Linux drama. They have been irrelevant for ages. They've had this stupid lawsuit going on over Linux for years. Has this ever amounted to anything? The moral of the story: what gets large numbers of people laid off, what really causes genuine suffering, is stupid business decisions. Stuff in the press is interesting to talk about, but way overblown most of the time.
The monopoly case is the biggest argument against MS because it landed a conviction. And the meat of it: MS leaned on OEMs to push IE. For the sake of argument, let's say that's crossing the line. (Though last time I checked, IE is the default browser in Windows...) But what actually killed Netscape? They tried to rewrite their browser from scratch, and didn't have a product for several years.
And let's not forget that big evil corporations are actually made up of people like us. MS's people seem to be pretty loveable:
Their customers loved them. To my mind, a Windows PC always meant half-baked junk, tons of software that didn't really work, basically crap. But that was what people wanted. And for all its dreaded monopoly, I could always do what I wanted on a Mac.
Developers loved them. There is a massive industry around MS; all of Gates' wealth was a fraction of what other people earned developing for Windows. True, they've never left the closed source mindset, and they've always had a shaky record with standards, but for the most part anyone who had an idea could buy relatively cheap, decent quality development tools and start coding.
Investors loved them. There are a whole lot of people who have had their retirements become a little bit nicer thanks to MS making good business decisions.
And the US government and many other governments have gotten a ton of tax dollars from them and their customers, employees and shareholders.
So, anyone can sign up to be an iOS developer [apple.com] for $99 a year, and then test their modified version [apple.com] to their heart's content.
If Apple modified maters so anyone could be an iOS developer without paying extra to Apple, without contacting Apple, without signing up or executing another agreement with Apple, then the software could be GPL compliant.
The GPL does not allow additional restrictions to be added to compliant software (for example, a requirement that you contact the software author and ask for permission before you can modify and load modified code, would make the software GPL-incompatible).
Are we talking GPL v2? "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License."
What restrictions am *I* placing on the recipients? I'm not charging the fees or requiring they sign up with Apple. People have released software on Mac OS for ages, even though, technically, you have to agree to a EULA to get Xcode.
If we're talking v3, then under section 6, you're installing on an iOS device, which is most certainly a User Product. You have to include Installation Information, which "means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made."
Notably, though, it doesn't say that modification and installation has to be free. What kills the App Store is the following clause: "Corresponding Source conveyed, and Installation Information provided, in accord with this section must be in a format that is publicly documented (and with an implementation available to the public in source code form), and must require no special password or key for unpacking, reading or copying."
I'm not even sure what that means. Is it just the download and install portion? Or do they expect someone managing any kind of software update feature to keep source implementation of their whole datacenter constantly available?
The only realistic way of beating malware is white-listing, and the App Store model is the only realistic way to do white-listing.
Having said that, you could have an oligarchy of white-listers instead of the Apple monarchy. But that's like certificate authorities: all I know when I visit foocorp.com is that it really is the site of Foo Corp. and that they really did shell out $50 for a business license.
the incompatibility between the App Store's (and Windows Marketplace's) terms of service on one hand and GPLv2 on the other is a problem in need of a fix.'"
No, the app store model does not need a fix, because it's not inherently incompatible. Source code can still be provided, with download instructions.
What's in need of a fix are the fact that phones are locked down to prevent the user from modifying and installing any application they want, without crypto signing and the manufacturer's approval.
App store providers can fix it if they insert a clause in their license terms requiring the user be allowed to modify, compile, and install any application they want on their own, without requiring any crypto signatures.
I'm trying to see how Apple could relax those restrictions without iOS being slammed with malware. If anyone other than Apple can sign an app for general use, iOS will be slammed. If you can sign an app for only your account, it's hardly better than the current situation.
The only realistic way of beating malware is white-listing, and the App Store model is the only realistic way to do white-listing. The alternative, which is the state of the typical PC, is that your system is constantly owned by someone else. So it seems that most users are going to be owned, whether it's by a big corporation or a script kiddie, it doesn't make much difference in terms of freedom.
Apple's Xcode is included in the Mac App Store. It includes GPLed stuff like GCC. Can this be a problem like VLC?
Or are the rules for the Mac App Store different from those of the iOS App Store?
Completely different. The Mac App Store is simply another way of getting software on your Mac. On iOS, the App Store is the only way of getting software.
Not donating enough to the various political parties.
A quick check shows Google and its employees are pretty active politically, and I suspect that if Democrats want more money from them they just have to ask. It could be a shakedown, but there's not a shred of evidence that this is the case beyond vague claims that it's happened before. I find anyone who calls himself an "insider", let alone a magazine that calls itself that, to be consistently full of shit.
The simplest explanation for why liberal Democrats are conducting an anti-trust investigation is that their constituents want them to. Investigating a gigantic corporation in pursuit of a heavily regulated economy is as natural to them as hating baseball and apple pie. I think their notions of anti-trust are based on an economic theory consisting of fairness and pixie dust, but I don't doubt that they believe it.
Seems someone thought of that last May. Since most wind farms I've heard of are around 20 MW, 1000 MW is amazingly huge, especially since it would all be off-shore.
Another point about safe: in Japan, everyone's packed into a tiny set of islands. They have no choice but to live right next to their reactor. They also don't have the real estate for wind farms.
For us, we can put our nukes far away from population centers. Right where you'd build some stupid wind farms.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the traditional mass media has done plenty to damage their own credibility. Why blame the internet?
Their credibility was an aberration to begin with, and really only came about because of big business got in bed with big government during the 1920s. The syndicates, naturally, wanted to get stories ahead of the smaller papers and came to a cozy agreement with politicians not to say anything too outrageous. The politicians were only too happy to comply, and this pushed the smaller, noisier papers to covering local matters. The syndicates were able to promote themselves as being the voice of authority, the peak of which came with Walter Cronkite.
This is yet another story about something we've heard a million times over, but they put "Internet!" in the title and treat it as though it's novel.
"Birtherism" isn't new, nor limited to black presidents. There was a long argument over whether McCain was native born, there were even debates about whether George W Bush was native born, and have been about presidents going way back. Even recently there was a huge amount of discussion over whether Sarah Palin was really Trig's mother. Even after multiple journalists reported that they had seen her pregnant belly, other equally prominent journalists were still Just Asking Questions.
And birtherism is loopy, but nothing compared to trutherism. About one third of Democrats believed that the government intentionally killed its own citizens to start a wars or, at least, that Bush knew about 9/11 and let it happen. Most Democrats also still claim that W was AWOL from his guard duty, and many prominent figures demanded explanations. CBS's Dan Rather, a 40 year veteran reporter, completely destroyed his career trying to pass off some forged documents. To this day, the guy insists that those forgeries were "fake but accurate". And, of course, there are long standing conspiracy theories about the Bush family's involvement with Nazis and such.
This gets play because "ooh, look, the Internet!" but if you look at what various conspiracies have in common, they're all old fashioned fishing expeditions. After Obama presented the long form, Trump *instantly* went to demanding his college records. The weird Palin birthers want all sorts of hospital records. The AWOL Bush people had huge lists of demands.
All these demands seek to scrutinize every possible second of a person's life. What happens when it's put into practice is the unbounded, independent prosecutor. Ken Starr, for instance, started out by investigating serious claims of corruption by the Clintons. When that turned up nothing, it morphed into a fishing expedition that turned up Lewinsky, Jones and Flowers. Incidentally, there are Clinton obsessives who are still Just Asking Questions, I won't link to it, but do a search for the "Clinton Death List" if you're curious to see some real crazy.
If we heard that a United States General had been captured, crucified, and fed to rats, would that soothe the average American or aggravate him? Would he be more or less likely to support violent retribution or volunteer to fight?
Trumpeting a triumph in victory against our foes is all well and good, but purposeful desecration of the body? We're better than that. A slap in the face against deeply conditioned religious beliefs? I would hope we're smarter than that.
They've already given him a burial at sea in accordance with Islamic traditions.
I pity the folks who, upon visiting a major website, have to wade through 10 dialogs where each more or less thoroughly tries to explain them the particular meaning of their "SC=" cookie and why they feel it is paramount for them to send it. It's suicide for both the user and the website.
That's certainly the reason no one ever turned on cookie checking, but it's fine to tentatively accept a cookie and then delete it later. After all, it's not like I care that a site knows that I just visited it, after all, that's in their server logs anyway.
If you did that, and the cookies were were displayed all at once for the page, it wouldn't be so bad. All you need then is a summary of where elements (cookies, images, flash, scripts) came from on the page, ideally with categories or descriptions looked up from a privacy advocate. You can crowdsource all that work anyway.
This is basically what AdBlock does anyway, only it's simply deleting stuff categorized as "ads".
We could look them up with Hoogle or Hayoo API searches.
*And* you'd have a huge bank of open source software coming available as they expired.
Ad hominem much?
The GP isn't an ad hominem. Spolsky is arguing from his authority as a successful entrepreneur, so it's perfectly reasonable to call him on that note.
Especially since that and "Microsoft and Google do it, too" is pretty much his entire argument.
By the way, Joel also runs stackoverflow.com, which is huge.
It's big, though stackexchange hasn't taken off similarly, so while it's a good trick, it's still one trick. I'm sure he's certainly making a good amount of money, but since they're (to my knowledge) an unlisted company, it's impossible to say how much.
(and Hollywood ends up filming because it's realized the audience is incapable of spending money on original ideas, but really, they're only doing that because of market research, so it's the same dopes who send in their unoriginal ideas who are demanding and paying to see movies with those unoriginal ideas; it's all perfectly logical, and artless).
You're being unduly critical of the audience.
The reason Hollywood films are bland and derivative is because Hollywood makes blockbusters. A blockbuster might gross, say, $70 million. Now, that gross is from selling tickets at $7 a pop, meaning that they had to convince 10 million people to agree on what would be entertaining to watch.
If Hollywood was willing to make a movie that appealed to just one tenth the number of people, they could do far more novel stuff. But, they're in it for the money, and so they don't.
There are plenty of smaller studios that do interesting films, and occasionally those films catch on with a wider audience. The biggest for the smaller studios is that they don't have the connections and don't get the corporate welfare that the big Hollywood studios do.
I get the usual Idiocracy "you're a fag and your shit's all retarded" type responses from morons.
I call bullshit. Even on the odd chance one of them didn't abbreviate "your" as "ur", no one commenting on Youtube uses apostrophes correctly.
I mean no offense, but as a student of history, aren't FUD and Microsoft synonymous?
This FUD got Google dragged before the US Senate, so it's pretty newsworthy.
.FACT... is trivial ... with a wealth of ... is easy ... will NOT get infected ...
Those are three opinions, and one guarantee, none of which are facts.
..FACT.. Talk to ANYONE...
That's conventional wisdom, not a fact.
..FACT...Linux without IT personnel IS WORTHLESS.
That's an estimation of worth, not a fact.
..FACT...When Linux becomes a big enough target...
That's a prediction, not a fact.
So your entire argument is based around several fallacies.
Nope, none of them were fallacies, they're all false assertions.
... this econ 101 question "What am I doing wrong, that my competitors are doing right?"
Econ 101 is about microeconomic equilibria, such as opportunity cost, supply and demand, etc. Your question sounds like some kind of management seminar.
RH have annual revenue of just under $1 billion. That's enough for any company.
What a stupid, fatuous remark.
So, when you're trying to retire, how is your 401K going to make any money if half the companies in it just decide, "yeah, we've made enough, we're just going to hold what we've got?"
Or, if you were a customer, how would you feel if they said, "nope, we've got enough business, sorry."
Or, if you were looking for a job and they tell you, "nope, no positions available, we're not expanding any more."
Oh, right, you'd be balling your eyes out at the unfairness of it all.
CentOS what??? CentOS was created by an individual who's organization (a library IIRC) couldn't afford RHEL. Take off the tinfoil hat, step outside, and take a nice deep breath. Not every company can afford $799 per server per year. That's the minimum you can purchase and still get actual help.
Bullshit. $800 a year is a drop in the bucket compared to the salaries of the users + the salary of the IT support.
And everyone assumes non-profits are doing everything for the good of humanity, newsflash for you naive idiots: they're run by assholes who want to cut corners and enrich themselves just like everything else. The library that "couldn't afford" to spend $800 just shuffled it into a greedy manager's pay.
To send you a new wife.
In Soviet Russia, there's an app for that!
One guy claims:
AT&T's data appears to be wholely corrupted. Some days, AT&T will under-report my data usage by as much as 91%. (They said I used 92 meg, my firewall says I used 1.1 Gigs.) Some days, AT&T will over-report my data usage by as much as 4700%. (They said I used 3.8 Gig, dd-wrt says I used 80 meg. And no, this day wasn't anywhere near the day they under-reported.)
And another speculates:
Another user in the thread suggests that the discrepancy is because AT&T is measuring usage at the DSLAM, thereby creating unrealistic totals that incorporate PPPoE and ATM overhead
And we're taking that as gospel? AT&T needs to get off their asses and answer the questions, but so far we've got nothing to go on.
The speculation brings up a valid point, though. The government could actually be useful here by working out common overhead amounts for various types of services, or a test suite that the service (or a subscriber) could run. Essentially, if I'm using a cable modem, and I download a one gigabyte file, the meter might internally read 1.1 gb of usage, but would use a known ratio to estimate the actual application layer usage.
Seriously. A lot of media pundits are nothing but paid writers employed by major companies
Wait.
Stop.
You mean journalists work for companies?! And get paid?
Holy mother of all fucking conspiracies, Batman.
All that boilerplate is directly because Java has no templates. (I like Java's generics, they did generics right, but generics aren't templates.) And C++ templates could be awesome, but they are so painful to use.
Scheme is great. Code and data are the same structure, and any time you need a new language feature, you just write a macro and, blam, the language does what you want, no BS. I'd only use it over LISP because the Scheme community seems to be more active, especially with new flavors like Rocket.
The other language that's promising right now is Haskell, since it has beautifully simple but powerful syntax, and incredible type system, and ghc has an awesome template system that will hopefully be part of the core language before too long.
Subverting governments: They paid people who should represent the government to instead represent Microsoft in the standards body. It might or might not have been illegal, but it subverted the government's interests.
Most standards are industry standards. So you've got a bunch of companies jockeying to have their way of doing things become the standard. Sometimes MS was successful, other times they weren't. Are you really going to claim that they're less ethical than a company like Sony?
Of the standards that serve government interests directly, such as defense standards, I can't think of any MS was involved in. (But, big company, so I'm sure they were.)
Having worked around government for a few years myself, I can tell you that generally contractors care way more about doing the right thing than the government folks. After all, if the project is successful, they get another contract.
Monopoly: They had been tried and convicted under US law and they have managed to reduce their penalty largely through bribes, but they still were convicted. Nobody ever disputed the facts of the case or ruling under the law, only the size of the punishment.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend that their entire defense never happened, so the facts as the judge found them are absolutely what happened. What was it they did that was more unethical than their competitors?
Breaking contracts, while potentially not illegal is certainly unethical. And that should be the standard to judge their acts in this case.
No, the standard is, based on TFA, the behavior of their competitors.
And I'll assume you meant deliberately breaking contracts, since every software company ever founded would have to be put in prison for life if missing a deadline or going over budget was unethical.
I'd be pretty surprised if MS has ever deliberately broken a contract, since they wouldn't deliberately sign a contract that won't make money, so they don't have much motivation to break them.
Paying trolls like you or Forbes to defend their actions as ethical is quite funny.
Can't speak for Forbes, but I suspect they don't need to be paid to write an article that's guaranteed to start a flamewar. And my history of posts is up there for anyone to see.
It's depressing when everyone is forced to use shitty MS software and when I have to use it at work and curse because nothing ever fucking works. It's depressing that I just went to a job interview, and even though I wasn't pushing hard because I have a job, I was still annoyed that all they cared about was how little Java I had done recently. Motherfucker please, the guy who has coded in Java for 10 years is a shitty programmer who will fall apart if he gets outside his comfort zone. But that's what they want: everyone is his little box using the standard tools to do the standard jobs, complete conformity.
But the people who hate MS are even more conformist; they don't even think about what they're saying or why, it's just a kneejerk reaction. This whole discussion has been a two minutes hate, and anyone who doesn't conform must be being paid by the vast shadowy network of MS trolls. What the fuck ever.
Let me start off by saying that I think ethics are something individuals do. Any group, whether it's a church or a union or a corporation, might have good people, but the thing itself isn't ethical. And all the corporate "social responsibility" is bullshit, and the greenwashing is obviously bullshit.
But I think MS gets a bad rap, and, no, I don't like their products.
I do not think it means what you think it means. For a convicted monopolist with a track record of betraying their partners, subverting governments and standards bodies, and all around ruthless behavior to make the list, I wonder if the word 'ethical' means something to them other than what my dictionary says it does. Oddly enough Google, with their 'don't be evil' motto, doesn't seem to have made the list. I know they have committed their share of sins over the years, but it seems that what they have done so far does not hold a candle to even what Microsoft has done over the last decade.
Okay, this is a pretty good summary of the things /.ers love to hate about MS.
The ruthlessness of MS is what really gets people, because it plays into the stereotypical stovepipe hatted capitalist.
But what I see when I look back at all the companies during the PC era (from DOS to Win 95, more or less) is that everyone talked tough. Everyone wanted to dominate the market and make everyone else buy their stuff. And when MS outmaneuvered them, they all started crying. Even then, the "maneuvering" these companies did was BS. Really, there was squabbling and politics, but what sank companies was and is poor business decisions. MS made their share of bad decisions, but they were never bad enough to sink them. All the maneuvering and sensational headlines rarely amounted to any real world impact.
A good non-MS example: look at the whole SCO-Linux drama. They have been irrelevant for ages. They've had this stupid lawsuit going on over Linux for years. Has this ever amounted to anything? The moral of the story: what gets large numbers of people laid off, what really causes genuine suffering, is stupid business decisions. Stuff in the press is interesting to talk about, but way overblown most of the time.
The monopoly case is the biggest argument against MS because it landed a conviction. And the meat of it: MS leaned on OEMs to push IE. For the sake of argument, let's say that's crossing the line. (Though last time I checked, IE is the default browser in Windows...) But what actually killed Netscape? They tried to rewrite their browser from scratch, and didn't have a product for several years.
And let's not forget that big evil corporations are actually made up of people like us. MS's people seem to be pretty loveable:
Their customers loved them. To my mind, a Windows PC always meant half-baked junk, tons of software that didn't really work, basically crap. But that was what people wanted. And for all its dreaded monopoly, I could always do what I wanted on a Mac.
Developers loved them. There is a massive industry around MS; all of Gates' wealth was a fraction of what other people earned developing for Windows. True, they've never left the closed source mindset, and they've always had a shaky record with standards, but for the most part anyone who had an idea could buy relatively cheap, decent quality development tools and start coding.
Investors loved them. There are a whole lot of people who have had their retirements become a little bit nicer thanks to MS making good business decisions.
And the US government and many other governments have gotten a ton of tax dollars from them and their customers, employees and shareholders.
So, anyone can sign up to be an iOS developer [apple.com] for $99 a year, and then test their modified version [apple.com] to their heart's content.
If Apple modified maters so anyone could be an iOS developer without paying extra to Apple, without contacting Apple,
without signing up or executing another agreement with Apple, then the software could be GPL compliant.
The GPL does not allow additional restrictions to be added to compliant software (for example, a requirement that you contact the software author and ask for permission before you can modify and load modified code, would make the software GPL-incompatible).
Are we talking GPL v2? "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License."
What restrictions am *I* placing on the recipients? I'm not charging the fees or requiring they sign up with Apple. People have released software on Mac OS for ages, even though, technically, you have to agree to a EULA to get Xcode.
If we're talking v3, then under section 6, you're installing on an iOS device, which is most certainly a User Product. You have to include Installation Information, which "means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made."
Notably, though, it doesn't say that modification and installation has to be free. What kills the App Store is the following clause: "Corresponding Source conveyed, and Installation Information provided, in accord with this section must be in a format that is publicly documented (and with an implementation available to the public in source code form), and must require no special password or key for unpacking, reading or copying."
I'm not even sure what that means. Is it just the download and install portion? Or do they expect someone managing any kind of software update feature to keep source implementation of their whole datacenter constantly available?
The only realistic way of beating malware is white-listing, and the App Store model is the only realistic way to do white-listing.
Having said that, you could have an oligarchy of white-listers instead of the Apple monarchy. But that's like certificate authorities: all I know when I visit foocorp.com is that it really is the site of Foo Corp. and that they really did shell out $50 for a business license.
the incompatibility between the App Store's (and Windows Marketplace's) terms of service on one hand and GPLv2 on the other is a problem in need of a fix.'"
No, the app store model does not need a fix, because it's not inherently incompatible. Source code can still be provided, with download instructions.
What's in need of a fix are the fact that phones are locked down to prevent the user from modifying and installing any application they want, without crypto signing and the manufacturer's approval.
App store providers can fix it if they insert a clause in their license terms requiring the user be allowed to modify, compile, and install any application they want
on their own, without requiring any crypto signatures.
So, anyone can sign up to be an iOS developer for $99 a year, and then test their modified version to their heart's content. They can then do ad hoc distribution to 100 others. That's iOS development in a nutshell.
I'm trying to see how Apple could relax those restrictions without iOS being slammed with malware. If anyone other than Apple can sign an app for general use, iOS will be slammed. If you can sign an app for only your account, it's hardly better than the current situation.
The only realistic way of beating malware is white-listing, and the App Store model is the only realistic way to do white-listing. The alternative, which is the state of the typical PC, is that your system is constantly owned by someone else. So it seems that most users are going to be owned, whether it's by a big corporation or a script kiddie, it doesn't make much difference in terms of freedom.
Apple's Xcode is included in the Mac App Store. It includes GPLed stuff like GCC. Can this be a problem like VLC?
Or are the rules for the Mac App Store different from those of the iOS App Store?
Completely different. The Mac App Store is simply another way of getting software on your Mac. On iOS, the App Store is the only way of getting software.
Not donating enough to the various political parties.
A quick check shows Google and its employees are pretty active politically, and I suspect that if Democrats want more money from them they just have to ask. It could be a shakedown, but there's not a shred of evidence that this is the case beyond vague claims that it's happened before. I find anyone who calls himself an "insider", let alone a magazine that calls itself that, to be consistently full of shit.
The simplest explanation for why liberal Democrats are conducting an anti-trust investigation is that their constituents want them to. Investigating a gigantic corporation in pursuit of a heavily regulated economy is as natural to them as hating baseball and apple pie. I think their notions of anti-trust are based on an economic theory consisting of fairness and pixie dust, but I don't doubt that they believe it.
Seems someone thought of that last May. Since most wind farms I've heard of are around 20 MW, 1000 MW is amazingly huge, especially since it would all be off-shore.
Another point about safe: in Japan, everyone's packed into a tiny set of islands. They have no choice but to live right next to their reactor. They also don't have the real estate for wind farms.
For us, we can put our nukes far away from population centers. Right where you'd build some stupid wind farms.