This phenomenon seems to pop up with amusing regularity in the 'nix world. Every once in a while, some marketing genius comes up with the brilliant idea to jump on the popularity of the open source bandwagon by.......showing how their product is proprietary and and thus superior. It's really difficult to say if they are just clueless or somewhat thick.
Free hint to marketers - if you're trying to target free/open software customers, DON'T TRY TO IMPRESS THEM BY SAYING YOU'RE THE OPPOSITE.
Look at the above statement and think real hard. Repeat till done.
To all the people asking why there is no nobel in math of comp. sci....there have been many people asking the same question about mechanical engineering, civil engineering, aeronautics, etc., for years. Keep in mind that the Nobel prizes were awarded more than 100 years ago, so these fields were very valuable and saved millions of lives many decades ago, and yet did not merit a Nobel.
The answer is in the intent and purpose of the prize. Also, the nobel in Economics arrived recently, in the 1960s, and is titled
"The Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel." It is in many ways different from the "original prizes".
Check out the history for the answers, and as to why there is no Nobel in mathematics.
There is no battle. The reason it's not a good idea to add your name to everything you post is because you may not even know who is looking it up. I know for a fact that many employers search names before considering an interview. And they don't tell you if they don't call you.
No matter what your *own* views are about the bravery of saying that you "won't pee in a jar", the reality is that such language will result in you not even being considered for a job. Many of these decisions are made by human resource personnel who have no clue about your viewpoint, and nor do they give a damn.
Maybe you're young, and maybe some day you will apply to a really different job 20 years from now. These things may come back to haunt you at that point, and you may not want it if you have kids and a wife and mortgage payments.
Personally, I'm not in that situation, but I'm not fond of HR people and their narrow perspective either. We can't predict the future, and I don't trust having my heat-of-the-moment views littered all over the place for misinterpretation.
Basically, my views stand on their own - I don't gain anything by having my real name attached to them. But I have a lot to lose if those views can be misinterpreted or prove embarrassing years or decades from now. You need to think about it. That's all.
Simply because no matter how clever and wise you think your thoughts are today, they may be regrettable in 20 years. Your views and employers may have changed, but your ASCII scribbles would still be on the wall.
Who knows, maybe the ideology or F word may be out of fashion and make you look like an idiot. Or maybe your writings were never very sombre to start with.
Another good reason is that you don't want to land up in a collected database. Information is always collected. Just check up your name on whowhere.com or similar engines - you may be in for a shock.
We have had this theme echo through various phases of history.
The answer is, predictably, a boring "Yes".
When the Industrial Revolution came upon us, there were visions of machines that ran non-stop, vomiting steam, controlling all human activity. Well, that has happened. However, the machines did not really control us in the 1920s.
Similarly, there were visions of calculating artificial brains controlling us in the 1960s. Novels were written. Philosophers pontificated about how "computers were taking over". Yes, we do have FAA software and traffic systems regulating how our airplanes land and cars go through the freeways, but....machines do not control us.
Now we have morons predicting how our majestic powerful computers are going to control everything.
Yadda. Yadda. Yadda. I personally would like to see the credentials of these people. "What is it doing to our souls?"
It's making mine emit a big yawn. Go watch some movies. Try coming up with a real article if you want readers to click those "hits" your editors want.
Yes, we all have the pressure to seem to be a visionary. But please...don't come up with crap like this to justify dramatic gee-whiz 21st century futuristic media.
If you go through the details of the policy statements, you encounter some annoying details:
1) If you have problems with the credit card, the registar may take a look at the domain name and decide not to register it, even if you can pay them. And if you do, there's a 200-300 $ "reinstatement" fee (pricey for a $35/year contract).
"We will reinstate your domain name registration solely at our discretion, and subject to our receipt of the initial registration or renewal fee and our then-current reinstatement fee, currently set at US$200."
2) They "own" your telephone # and other details:
"You further agree and acknowledge that we own the following information for those registrations for which we are the registrar:
(a) the original creation date of the registration, (b) the expiration date of the registration, (c) the name, postal address, e-mail address, voice telephone number, and where available fax number of the technical contact, administrative contact, zone contact and billing contact for the domain name registration"
3) A 7 day notice to cancel your domain:
"You also agree that register.com shall have the right in its sole discretion to suspend, cancel, transfer or otherwise modify a domain name registration upon seven (7) calendar days prior written notice, or at such time as register.com receives a properly authenticated order from a court of competent jurisdiction"
I find a 200 or 300 $ reinstatement fee quite high (my auto insurance takes a 10% reinstatement fee, and for domain names, it's more than 600%?), and the other details are also quite demanding. Sure, you may argue that they are not likely to enforce it, but that's not the point - the agreement shouldn't be such a sell-your-soul and expect-us-to-cancel-when-we-want deal.
Also interesting is the fact that all the terms and conditions for the various registrars are almost identical, word by word. I think this field still needs a lot of competition.
L.
PS - If you've had good or bad experiences, please post them. A friend of mine is about to register and wants to know which company to go with. Price, quality, etc. - post the details. It will help us all.
"In practice, for each Web page Google basically sums the scores of other locations pointing to it. So, when presented with a specific query, Google can respond by quickly retrieving all pages containing the search text and listing them according to their preordained ranks."
I'm not sure why we pay so much attention to MS propaganda pages. Does anyone actually read that stuff?
From a cursory reading, it seems to be the MS equivalent of those airline brochures which claim that their peanuts are fresher and that their flights are smoother. Face it - nobody really reads this stuff.
It only gets attention when/. or some journalist shines the spotlight.
Do you have anything to back up your assertion that the Antitrust finding against IBM hurt the mainframe market?
My point was that it was unneccessary. Ultimately, I think govt. should interfere only when it's absolutely neccessary.
The lawsuit was that IBM unfairly bundled products (sounds familiar?) - basically, their hardware and software. Anybody who claims that IBM should have been broken up into hardware and software mainframe divisions will look like an idiot today.
In my opinion it is an open question as to whether Microsoft's market power is hurting software innovation.
That's irrelavent. We don't have courts to decide whether companies are hurting innovation.
What I think is going to happen is that the DOJ will place certain restrictions on Microsoft - no undocumented API's, publish the source code for Windoze, can't add certain types of features to the OS, can't give away software for free, etc.
How will this be enforced? Does the DoJ have talented programmers to carry out all of the above? MS seems to be having a difficult enough job controlling its software with 20,000 employees. This is the biggest problem I have with the "break up/enforcement" solution. It's a pie-in-the-sky answer. "The DoJ must make sure the APIs are fairly distributed." How? Do the DoJ lawyers even know what an API means? Do you want APIs being regulated by lawyers?
I think this is the geek dependence on logic - you forget the implementation is in the hands of *lawyers* and *politicians*. I don't want either of them deciding anything about any kind of software.
Oracle's midrange competition includes DB2, Informix, MS SQL and others. Their market share is only 55% on UNIX. Not even close to a monopoly.
I said midrange database servers, not Unix. Midrange includes NT, which is Oracle's cash cow.
In any case, it was an example. The point is that if you slice the 100 billion software market into various segments, you'll find monopolies in lots of areas. And my larger point was that govt. can't micromanage this. Nor can it manage the breakup or efficient regulation of how software industries should be run.
You may cheer the govt. clubbing of MS, but ultimately, they are lawyers. They don't know the difference between APIs and OSes, they don't care. They will regulate what they want, and I think the clapping will stop soon. At some point it will dawn on people that they are are cheering govt. lawyers.
"IBM controlled the majority of the hardware market, not the software that made the hardware work."
I think you're mistakenly referring to the IBM PC. This was not the subject of the anti-trust lawsuit. It was the IBM OS/360 mainframe, for which they sold the hardware and software. This was also before the PC industry, at a time when a "computer" meant a room size machine.
And they controlled everything, not just the API and OS.
People tend to think in black & white. Reality occurs in various intermediate shades. If Microsoft is "guilty", the question is - guilty of what, and what must be the remedy? And what purpose will it serve?
First of all, just about ALL the *specific* issues that were argued in the anti-trust trial (ISP arm twisting, browser bundling, etc) are already obsolete (did you notice how nobody is suggesting these days that MS should seperate the browser from the OS?) . This raises profound questions:
* how must a monopoly in software be proven? And how can its misuse be proven?
* how must the remedy be issued, when you know for certain that by the time you make the judgement, the original complaints are obsolete in this fast moving industry.
For starters, monopoly for MS is not as simple as it appears, since you're narrowing the industry to the "PC operating systems" arena. If you narrow down segments of industry, Oracle is a monopoly in the midrange server database market (HP tunes its OS to run faster on Oracle, is that a sign of too much power?), and IBM is a monopoly in the mainframe database segment (easily more than 90% of S/370 machines use DB2, both of them ibm products). Similarly, Palm may be said to be a monopoly in the handheld segment.
I think if any of the above companies were subject to the same scrutiny as MS, there would be several issues of leverage of market share.
Now...even if a company is proven to have a monopoly in that segment, and abuse it, what do you do? This is not like the telephone industry, where a product doesn't change for 20 years. The original issues are already obsolete.
Keep in mind that one major reason for IBM's downfall was a 10 year lawsuit by the same Dept. of Justice. The case? IBM was bundling its mainframe hardware, OS, and database products. At that time, geeks were cheering on two young companies that dared to take on the evil monolithic empire - Microsoft and Apple.
Well, guess what? 20 years later - IBM is STILL bundling its hardware, OS, and database products. Why is the DoJ not caring? Because it's a dead, obsolete market. The mainframe has been overtaken by the PC, and all the issues that were so fiercely argued decades ago, became irrelevant. It's the same deal. IBM caved in due to the lawsuit, which resulted in literally a warehouse full of documents they had to shovel around.
Should IBM have been hurt so badly because it played rough in the mainframe market, knowing that it was an unquestioned giant (and not knowing that it was surrounded by nimble, faster velociraptors)? Because of the DoJ case, IBM had reached the point where lawyers were attending every meeting, and had to approve of every plan. It killed them. Did they deserve it?
I don't think so. You may think MS is truly bad and evil, but the reality is they are just like any other company. And the reality is also that it's better for the govt. to stay away. This is very difficult to realise when you hate Microsoft so badly, but keep in mind that many young geeks hated IBM just as badly, and the point still stands - if you wound a company that will be obsolete in a decade or two because it played rough, it will always be unfair from a historical viewpoint.
Keep the long view in mind. Breaking up the company may seem tempting, but you'll only hurt the industry - the same way the DOJ's interference in IBM's day-to-day affairs hurt the mainframe market nobody cares about now. Keep that in mind.
People tend to think in black & white. Reality occurs in various intermediate shades. If Microsoft is "guilty", the question is - guilty of what, and what must be the remedy? And what purpose will it serve?
First of all, just about ALL the *specific* issues that were argued in the anti-trust trial (ISP arm twisting, browser bundling, etc) are already obsolete (did you notice how nobody is suggesting these days that MS should seperate the browser from the OS?) . This raises profound questions:
* how must a monopoly in software be proven? And how can its misuse be proven?
* And how must the remedy be issued, when you know for certain that by the time you make the judgement, the original complaints are obsolete in this fast moving industry.
For starters, monopoly for MS is not as simple as it appears, since you're narrowing the industry to the "PC operating systems" arena. If you narrow down segments of industry, Oracle is a monopoly in the midrange server database market (HP tunes its OS to run faster on Oracle, is that a sign of too much power?), and IBM is a monopoly in the mainframe database segment (easily more than 90% of S/370 machines use DB2, both of them ibm products). Similarly, Palm may be said to be a monopoly in the handheld segment.
I think if any of the above companies were subject to the same scrutiny as MS, there would be several issues of leverage of market share.
Now...even if a company is proven to have a monopoly in that segment, and abuse it, what do you do? This is not like the telephone industry, where a product doesn't change for 20 years. The original issues are already obsolete.
Keep in mind that one major reason for IBM's downfall was a 10 year lawsuit by the same Dept. of Justice. The case? IBM was bundling its mainframe hardware, OS, and database products. At that time, geeks were cheering on two young companies that dared to take on the evil monolithic empire - Microsoft and Apple.
Well, guess what? 20 years later - IBM is STILL bundling its hardware, OS, and database products. Why is the DoJ not caring? Because it's a dead, obsolete market. The mainframe has been overtaken by the PC, and all the issues that were so fiercely argued decades ago, became irrelevant. It's the same deal. IBM caved in due to the lawsuit, which resulted in literally a warehouse full of documents they had to shovel around.
Should IBM have been hurt so badly because it played rough in the mainframe market, knowing that it was an unquestioned giant (and not knowing that it was surrounded by nimble, faster velociraptors)? Because of the DoJ case, IBM had reached the point where lawyers were attending every meeting, and had to approve of every plan. It killed them. Did they deserve it?
I don't think so. You may think MS is truly bad and evil, but the reality is they are just like any other company. And the reality is also that it's better for the govt. to stay away. This is very difficult to realise when you hate Microsoft so badly, but keep in mind that many young geeks hated IBM just as badly, and the point still stands - if you wound a company that will be obsolete in a decade or two because it played rough, it will always look unfair from a historical viewpoint.
Keep the long view in mind. Breaking up the company may seem tempting, but you'll only hurt the industry - the same way the DOJ's interference in IBM's day-to-day affairs hurt the mainframe market nobody cares about now. Keep that in mind.
In an update to the story, an anonymous source at ZDNet admitted that they used a genuine IT manager during the tests. "The decision not to apply the fixes came about due to our adherance to realistic simulations. We feel most IT managers are clueless, so we used a representative sample from our own labs. He made the decision," said the source, speaking under conditions of anonymity. "We feel this better represents the real world scenario."
In unrelated news, seismologists reported a strange disturbance, which they claimed was caused by thousands of sysadmins nodding their heads in agreement at the same time. The phenomenon has tentatively been titled "the Slashdot Effect".
"The e-mail fiasco was a disaster," wrote one grizzled and sensible veteran. "I was on the alias and probably got around 300-400 'why am I on this, take me off' messages. They should be all fired and their options shared among the people who didn't act like idiots."
"Yeah! Who wants a stupid sheep when we could get a Wooly Mammoth?"
I think you underestimate this naughty, lovable creature. Here, I present to you the most articulate explanation of why sheep is the Ultimate Mammal(TM) http://www.dotdotdot.net/pr0n/
I sincerely hope your views will undergo a profound change.
The media constantly monitors/. as a reflection of the state of open source. And when two of the most well known personalities indulge in a high quality scuffle of name calling of the kind I haven't seen since 4th grade, it creates a BAD image of the community as a whole.
One question is often asked with some frequency - Can a bunch of loosely gathered hobbyists and college students be trusted to write critical software? "Aren't they just a bunch of kids playing around?" - the saying goes.
And trust me - this kind of scuffling doesn't help (especially when it comes from the evangelist spreading the word about how mature the open source development community is).
Perception matters more than you think. As things stand, one of the big misconceptions about open source/linux is that it's run by anarchist geeks with long hair who can't be trusted. Yes, I know it's an unfair image, but it exists nonetheless.
It's the same problem that Sun often has - McNealy's statements are often so immature that people have difficulty taking him seriously. Sometimes ESR's comments also get a little high on vanity and boastfulness, and frankly, all it does is make everyone look immature. Similarly, when linux advocates bitterly bite and scratch, and then carry out an extended argument as to who started the fight, who has apologized how many times, etc. etc. it begins to enter the grey area between amusement and shooting-oneself-in-the-foot-with-remarkable-accur acy.
If you want to propagate a good image of open source, just keep the personality battles out of the picture. Nobody really cares, and it just makes a mockery of evangelism and advocacy.
The process that takes place during tea making is known as "leaching", familiar to students of chemical engineering. Leaching involves the extraction of soluble chemicals from a solid or porous object by subjecting it to a current of liquid solvent. The design of leaching equipment is both complex and well studied, and involves optimization using methods such as cross-current and counter current flow (to extract as much as possible by trying to increase the concentration gradient and effective factors such as temperature, pressure, etc.)
I normally follow the following unique procedure -
1) Mix 1/2 cup water and milk
2) Bring it to a boil
3) Dunk in the tea leaves (real ones, not the stupid teabag thingie), turn off the heat, keep covered
4) Let it sit for 2-3 minutes
5) Filter using an appropriate mechanism
6) Add your preferred amount of sugar
This was described to me by a guy from India, and it comes out quite strong and flavorful. It, however, is not the l33t connoisseur's methodology, which normally involves boiling water and adding the tea leaves, then waiting for a longer period of time (5-6 mins).
Note - Use actual tea instead of tea bags (preferably stuff you can find in ethnic stores). Also, let the water run for a while from the faucet - the initial body of water tends to be staler and less oxygenated.
An alternative method is as follows:
1) pour desired liquid(s) in said cup and place in a microwave oven.
2) Nuke till it boils (2:38 mins on my 900 Watt Sharp Carousel)
3) Add the tea
4) Wait till it's done.
Historical footnote - Legend has it that tea was invented accidentally when tea leaves drifted into a Chinese emperor's hot water (which always made me wonder why he was drinking hot water and in a place likely to allow leaves to fall in). Just found this -
http://www.aromas.com.au/AllTea.html
There are as many legends surrounding the origins of tea drinking as there are for coffee. The most popular tells of the Chinese Emperor, Shen Nung, in 2,737 BC. He was boiling his drinking water under a tree, Camellia sinensis, when some leaves fell into the pot. The emperor was so delighted with the brew that he began to cultivate the plant. Although it is thought the plant originated in India, the earliest recorded evidence of its cultivation comes from China in the 4th century. At that time, however, the leaves were not brewed as a drink but made into cakes and boiled with rice, spices or nuts. Later the dried leaves were powdered and whipped into hot water, rather like cocoa. The infusion of tea leaves in boiling water which we know today did not become fashionable until the Ming Dynasty, from 1368 to 1644.
Oddly, I couldn't find the British standards institute way of making tea. A search for tea only gives this page : http://www.bsi.org.uk/bsi/products/standards/dev elopment/committees/consumer.xhtml
It does have the wise committee's email addr. Just don't slashdot them asking for tea recipes.:)
I hereby place the step-by-step tea making code included in this document under the GPL (which can be obtained by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA)
In her article, published in 1843, Lady Lovelace's prescient comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. She was correct.
When inspired Ada could be very focused and a mathematical taskmaster. Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor in 1979.
It's been mathematically proved that the number of all possible combinations of chess moves is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, approximately 10^ 80. This is why the concept of chess being solved once and for all, so that once the first move is made, all the future moves are computed by the other side, resulting in a game with an obvious ending, is not a real possibility.
20% of Silicon Valley startups are founded by immigrants, and 33% of valley engineers/programmers are immigrants. CIA projects require security clearance, and it will be difficult to fund a venture that doesn't involve foreigners at some point.
It may be possible, but it's difficult to populate a startup with exclusively US citizens. I don't think there's a single Silicon valley startup that doesn't employ foreigners.
Of course, there's also the drug test, which a lot of the notoriously liberal Silicon valley crowd might fail.
Finally - there's the question of why someone would want to work for a govt. bureaucracy "startup" when there's a shitload of money to be made working for a real company. Money has no ideology.
There's also a MASSIVE conflict of interest - a venture capital tries to make a mass marketed product which brings in profits, the CIA tries to make a secret product that only it can use. I'm not sure how the secret service can use a product that is freely available to the entire world. This is a direct contradiction.
There was a recent show on NPR about chess playing which involved the players starting off with a blank board, then placing the pieces on it one by one, effectively playing backwards, until finally both ended up with the "normal" initial placement. It struck me as quirky and intriguing. I believe this was on a Harry Shearer show, so it was most likely a parody, but it seems remarkbly similar to reverse engineering on a logical level. Not to mention interesting - have to try it out sometime and see what it's like.
In talking of an autistic continuum, we imply a single dimension, in which a condition such as Asperger's syndrome constitutes a milder form of the same underlying disorder that is seen in autism. However, clinical accounts suggest that conditions resembling autism do not differ just in terms of severity, but also in pattern of symptoms.
Thus the label Asperger's syndrome is typically applied to clumsy children with circumscribed interests, whose early language development is not delayed, and who may have a verbal IQ well above performance IQ (Wing, 1981). In contrast, language-impaired children fitting the picture of semantic-pragmatic disorder typically first present with delayed language development and evident comprehension problems, and have a marked IQ discrepancy in favour of performance IQ.
Normally growth patterns in software usage tend to be explosive when it's a new phenomenon with a hungry need - the IBM PC, linux, netscape downloads, yahoo, amazon.com, etc. After the "revolutionary" period has worn off, the rate of growth stabilizes or becomes linear. At some point, it is destined to tend towards flatness, since the number of users is finite.
My guess is since fetch mail was catering to a well established community, it was by definition a smaller subset of a mature growing community, and its rate of growth was likely to be smaller than the parent. Also, it was not revolutionary or filled a major hunger, so it was not likely to grow at a > linear rate.
Actually, the FAA system runs on an IBM S/370 machine with software written in the 1960s. An effort to re-write the whole system was scrapped after 10 years and tens of millions of $. An article in Computerworld described the system as so antiquated that the wires literally crackled from age.
If re-writing the system was so difficult, I wouldn't be surprised if fixing it for Y2K wasn't carried out successfully. See, the people who issue these compliance statements are lawyers or MBA biz execs. Typically, they have no clue about what OS, software, etc. constitutes the system and what exactly the problems are.
As for the airline execs flying on Jan 1, 2000. I know a programmer at American Airlines who chuckled and said there was no way he would fly. Airlines don't handle the scheduling and path determination of flights - collision prevention is done by the FAA (read above.)
Keep in mind that the FAA system doesn't have to schedule 2 planes flying opposite each other - simply having a non-working or disabled system can cause a crash. In today's news - a pilot went down the wrong runway and crashed into a construction zone. I would hate to imagine what would happen if the central system went down and you had 100s of planes flying around without any guidance.
Slashdot Mirror
This phenomenon seems to pop up with amusing regularity in the 'nix world. Every once in a while, some marketing genius comes up with the brilliant idea to jump on the popularity of the open source bandwagon by.......showing how their product is proprietary and and thus superior. It's really difficult to say if they are just clueless or somewhat thick.
Free hint to marketers - if you're trying to target free/open software customers, DON'T TRY TO IMPRESS THEM BY SAYING YOU'RE THE OPPOSITE.
Look at the above statement and think real hard. Repeat till done.
L.
To all the people asking why there is no nobel in math of comp. sci....there have been many people asking the same question about mechanical engineering, civil engineering, aeronautics, etc., for years. Keep in mind that the Nobel prizes were awarded more than 100 years ago, so these fields were very valuable and saved millions of lives many decades ago, and yet did not merit a Nobel.
i story.html
The answer is in the intent and purpose of the prize. Also, the nobel in Economics arrived recently, in the 1960s, and is titled
"The Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel." It is in many ways different from the "original prizes".
Check out the history for the answers, and as to why there is no Nobel in mathematics.
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/sci/chem/guides/srs118_h
L.
Tony,
There is no battle. The reason it's not a good idea to add your name to everything you post is because you may not even know who is looking it up. I know for a fact that many employers search names before considering an interview. And they don't tell you if they don't call you.
No matter what your *own* views are about the bravery of saying that you "won't pee in a jar", the reality is that such language will result in you not even being considered for a job. Many of these decisions are made by human resource personnel who have no clue about your viewpoint, and nor do they give a damn.
Maybe you're young, and maybe some day you will apply to a really different job 20 years from now. These things may come back to haunt you at that point, and you may not want it if you have kids and a wife and mortgage payments.
Personally, I'm not in that situation, but I'm not fond of HR people and their narrow perspective either. We can't predict the future, and I don't trust having my heat-of-the-moment views littered all over the place for misinterpretation.
Basically, my views stand on their own - I don't gain anything by having my real name attached to them. But I have a lot to lose if those views can be misinterpreted or prove embarrassing years or decades from now. You need to think about it. That's all.
L.
I'm impressed that you illustrate my point without meaning to. The subject practically hammers it in, and even adds a touch of brilliant irony.
L.
Simply because no matter how clever and wise you think your thoughts are today, they may be regrettable in 20 years. Your views and employers may have changed, but your ASCII scribbles would still be on the wall.
Who knows, maybe the ideology or F word may be out of fashion and make you look like an idiot. Or maybe your writings were never very sombre to start with.
Another good reason is that you don't want to land up in a collected database. Information is always collected. Just check up your name on whowhere.com or similar engines - you may be in for a shock.
We have had this theme echo through various phases of history.
....machines do not control us.
The answer is, predictably, a boring "Yes".
When the Industrial Revolution came upon us, there were visions of machines that ran non-stop, vomiting steam, controlling all human activity. Well, that has happened. However, the machines did not really control us in the 1920s.
Similarly, there were visions of calculating artificial brains controlling us in the 1960s. Novels were written. Philosophers pontificated about how "computers were taking over". Yes, we do have FAA software and traffic systems regulating how our airplanes land and cars go through the freeways, but
Now we have morons predicting how our majestic powerful computers are going to control everything.
Yadda. Yadda. Yadda. I personally would like to see the credentials of these people. "What is it doing to our souls?"
It's making mine emit a big yawn. Go watch some movies. Try coming up with a real article if you want readers to click those "hits" your editors want.
Yes, we all have the pressure to seem to be a visionary. But please...don't come up with crap like this to justify dramatic gee-whiz 21st century futuristic media.
L.
If you go through the details of the policy statements, you encounter some annoying details:
1) If you have problems with the credit card, the registar may take a look at the domain name and decide not to register it, even if you can pay them. And if you do, there's a 200-300 $ "reinstatement" fee (pricey for a $35/year contract).
"We will reinstate your domain name registration solely at our discretion, and subject to our receipt of the initial registration or renewal fee and our then-current reinstatement fee, currently set at US$200."
2) They "own" your telephone # and other details:
"You further agree and
acknowledge that we own the following information for those registrations for which we are the registrar:
(a) the original creation date of the registration,
(b) the expiration date of the registration,
(c) the name, postal address, e-mail address, voice telephone number, and where available fax number of the technical
contact, administrative contact, zone contact and billing contact for the domain name registration"
3) A 7 day notice to cancel your domain:
"You also agree that register.com shall have the right in its sole discretion to suspend, cancel, transfer or otherwise modify a
domain name registration upon seven (7) calendar days prior written notice, or at such time as register.com receives a
properly authenticated order from a court of competent jurisdiction"
I find a 200 or 300 $ reinstatement fee quite high (my auto insurance takes a 10% reinstatement fee, and for domain names, it's more than 600%?), and the other details are also quite demanding. Sure, you may argue that they are not likely to enforce it, but that's not the point - the agreement shouldn't be such a sell-your-soul and expect-us-to-cancel-when-we-want deal.
Also interesting is the fact that all the terms and conditions for the various registrars are almost identical, word by word. I think this field still needs a lot of competition.
L.
PS - If you've had good or bad experiences, please post them. A friend of mine is about to register and wants to know which company to go with. Price, quality, etc. - post the details. It will help us all.
"In practice, for each Web page Google basically sums the scores of other locations pointing to it. So, when presented with a specific query, Google can respond by quickly retrieving all pages containing the search text and listing them according to their preordained ranks."
n .html
http://www.sciam.com/1999/0699issue/0699raghava
It's a good article on the new wave of search techniques.
L.
I'm not sure why we pay so much attention to MS propaganda pages. Does anyone actually read that stuff?
/. or some journalist shines the spotlight.
From a cursory reading, it seems to be the MS equivalent of those airline brochures which claim that their peanuts are fresher and that their flights are smoother. Face it - nobody really reads this stuff.
It only gets attention when
Do you have anything to back up your assertion that the Antitrust finding against IBM hurt the mainframe market?
My point was that it was unneccessary. Ultimately, I think govt. should interfere only when it's absolutely neccessary.
The lawsuit was that IBM unfairly bundled products (sounds familiar?) - basically, their hardware and software. Anybody who claims that IBM should have been broken up into hardware and software mainframe divisions will look like an idiot today.
In my opinion it is an open question as to whether Microsoft's market power is hurting software innovation.
That's irrelavent. We don't have courts to decide whether companies are hurting innovation.
What I think is going to happen is that the DOJ will place certain restrictions on Microsoft - no undocumented API's, publish the source code for Windoze, can't add certain types of features to the OS, can't give away software for free, etc.
How will this be enforced? Does the DoJ have talented programmers to carry out all of the above? MS seems to be having a difficult enough job controlling its software with 20,000 employees. This is the biggest problem I have with the "break up/enforcement" solution. It's a pie-in-the-sky answer. "The DoJ must make sure the APIs are fairly distributed." How? Do the DoJ lawyers even know what an API means? Do you want APIs being regulated by lawyers?
I think this is the geek dependence on logic - you forget the implementation is in the hands of *lawyers* and *politicians*. I don't want either of them deciding anything about any kind of software.
Oracle's midrange competition includes DB2, Informix, MS SQL and others. Their market share is only 55% on UNIX. Not even close to a monopoly.
I said midrange database servers, not Unix. Midrange includes NT, which is Oracle's cash cow.
In any case, it was an example. The point is that if you slice the 100 billion software market into various segments, you'll find monopolies in lots of areas. And my larger point was that govt. can't micromanage this. Nor can it manage the breakup or efficient regulation of how software industries should be run.
You may cheer the govt. clubbing of MS, but ultimately, they are lawyers. They don't know the difference between APIs and OSes, they don't care. They will regulate what they want, and I think the clapping will stop soon. At some point it will dawn on people that they are are cheering govt. lawyers.
"IBM controlled the majority of the hardware market, not the software that made the hardware work."
I think you're mistakenly referring to the IBM PC. This was not the subject of the anti-trust lawsuit. It was the IBM OS/360 mainframe, for which they sold the hardware and software. This was also before the PC industry, at a time when a "computer" meant a room size machine.
And they controlled everything, not just the API and OS.
People tend to think in black & white. Reality occurs in various intermediate shades. If Microsoft is "guilty", the question is - guilty of what, and what must be the remedy? And what purpose will it serve?
First of all, just about ALL the *specific* issues that were argued in the anti-trust trial (ISP arm twisting, browser bundling, etc) are already obsolete (did you notice how nobody is suggesting these days that MS should seperate the browser from the OS?) . This raises profound questions:
* how must a monopoly in software be proven? And how can its misuse be proven?
* how must the remedy be issued, when you know for certain that by the time you make the judgement, the original complaints are obsolete in this fast moving industry.
For starters, monopoly for MS is not as simple as it appears, since you're narrowing the industry to the "PC operating systems" arena. If you narrow down segments of industry, Oracle is a monopoly in the midrange server database market (HP tunes its OS to run faster on Oracle, is that a sign of too much power?), and IBM is a monopoly in the mainframe database segment (easily more than 90% of S/370 machines use DB2, both of them ibm products). Similarly, Palm may be said to be a monopoly in the handheld segment.
I think if any of the above companies were subject to the same scrutiny as MS, there would be several issues of leverage of market share.
Now...even if a company is proven to have a monopoly in that segment, and abuse it, what do you do? This is not like the telephone industry, where a product doesn't change for 20 years. The original issues are already obsolete.
Keep in mind that one major reason for IBM's downfall was a 10 year lawsuit by the same Dept. of Justice. The case? IBM was bundling its mainframe hardware, OS, and database products. At that time, geeks were cheering on two young companies that dared to take on the evil monolithic empire - Microsoft and Apple.
Well, guess what? 20 years later - IBM is STILL bundling its hardware, OS, and database products. Why is the DoJ not caring? Because it's a dead, obsolete market. The mainframe has been overtaken by the PC, and all the issues that were so fiercely argued decades ago, became irrelevant. It's the same deal. IBM caved in due to the lawsuit, which resulted in literally a warehouse full of documents they had to shovel around.
Should IBM have been hurt so badly because it played rough in the mainframe market, knowing that it was an unquestioned giant (and not knowing that it was surrounded by nimble, faster velociraptors)? Because of the DoJ case, IBM had reached the point where lawyers were attending every meeting, and had to approve of every plan. It killed them. Did they deserve it?
I don't think so. You may think MS is truly bad and evil, but the reality is they are just like any other company. And the reality is also that it's better for the govt. to stay away. This is very difficult to realise when you hate Microsoft so badly, but keep in mind that many young geeks hated IBM just as badly, and the point still stands - if you wound a company that will be obsolete in a decade or two because it played rough, it will always be unfair from a historical viewpoint.
Keep the long view in mind. Breaking up the company may seem tempting, but you'll only hurt the industry - the same way the DOJ's interference in IBM's day-to-day affairs hurt the mainframe market nobody cares about now. Keep that in mind.
People tend to think in black & white. Reality occurs in various intermediate shades. If Microsoft is "guilty", the question is - guilty of what, and what must be the remedy? And what purpose will it serve?
First of all, just about ALL the *specific* issues that were argued in the anti-trust trial (ISP arm twisting, browser bundling, etc) are already obsolete (did you notice how nobody is suggesting these days that MS should seperate the browser from the OS?) . This raises profound questions:
* how must a monopoly in software be proven? And how can its misuse be proven?
* And how must the remedy be issued, when you know for certain that by the time you make the judgement, the original complaints are obsolete in this fast moving industry.
For starters, monopoly for MS is not as simple as it appears, since you're narrowing the industry to the "PC operating systems" arena. If you narrow down segments of industry, Oracle is a monopoly in the midrange server database market (HP tunes its OS to run faster on Oracle, is that a sign of too much power?), and IBM is a monopoly in the mainframe database segment (easily more than 90% of S/370 machines use DB2, both of them ibm products). Similarly, Palm may be said to be a monopoly in the handheld segment.
I think if any of the above companies were subject to the same scrutiny as MS, there would be several issues of leverage of market share.
Now...even if a company is proven to have a monopoly in that segment, and abuse it, what do you do? This is not like the telephone industry, where a product doesn't change for 20 years. The original issues are already obsolete.
Keep in mind that one major reason for IBM's downfall was a 10 year lawsuit by the same Dept. of Justice. The case? IBM was bundling its mainframe hardware, OS, and database products. At that time, geeks were cheering on two young companies that dared to take on the evil monolithic empire - Microsoft and Apple.
Well, guess what? 20 years later - IBM is STILL bundling its hardware, OS, and database products. Why is the DoJ not caring? Because it's a dead, obsolete market. The mainframe has been overtaken by the PC, and all the issues that were so fiercely argued decades ago, became irrelevant. It's the same deal. IBM caved in due to the lawsuit, which resulted in literally a warehouse full of documents they had to shovel around.
Should IBM have been hurt so badly because it played rough in the mainframe market, knowing that it was an unquestioned giant (and not knowing that it was surrounded by nimble, faster velociraptors)? Because of the DoJ case, IBM had reached the point where lawyers were attending every meeting, and had to approve of every plan. It killed them. Did they deserve it?
I don't think so. You may think MS is truly bad and evil, but the reality is they are just like any other company. And the reality is also that it's better for the govt. to stay away. This is very difficult to realise when you hate Microsoft so badly, but keep in mind that many young geeks hated IBM just as badly, and the point still stands - if you wound a company that will be obsolete in a decade or two because it played rough, it will always look unfair from a historical viewpoint.
Keep the long view in mind. Breaking up the company may seem tempting, but you'll only hurt the industry - the same way the DOJ's interference in IBM's day-to-day affairs hurt the mainframe market nobody cares about now. Keep that in mind.
In an update to the story, an anonymous source at ZDNet admitted that they used a genuine IT manager during the tests. "The decision not to apply the fixes came about due to our adherance to realistic simulations. We feel most IT managers are clueless, so we used a representative sample from our own labs. He made the decision," said the source, speaking under conditions of anonymity. "We feel this better represents the real world scenario."
In unrelated news, seismologists reported a strange disturbance, which they claimed was caused by thousands of sysadmins nodding their heads in agreement at the same time. The phenomenon has tentatively been titled "the Slashdot Effect".
Anybody at MS remember this?
"Yeah! Who wants a stupid sheep when we could get a Wooly Mammoth?"
I think you underestimate this naughty, lovable creature. Here, I present to you the most articulate explanation of why sheep is the Ultimate Mammal(TM)
http://www.dotdotdot.net/pr0n/
I sincerely hope your views will undergo a profound change.
Thank you.
L.
The media constantly monitors /. as a reflection of the state of open source. And when two of the most well known personalities indulge in a high quality scuffle of name calling of the kind I haven't seen since 4th grade, it creates a BAD image of the community as a whole.
r acy.
One question is often asked with some frequency - Can a bunch of loosely gathered hobbyists and college students be trusted to write critical software? "Aren't they just a bunch of kids playing around?" - the saying goes.
And trust me - this kind of scuffling doesn't help (especially when it comes from the evangelist spreading the word about how mature the open source development community is).
Perception matters more than you think. As things stand, one of the big misconceptions about open source/linux is that it's run by anarchist geeks with long hair who can't be trusted. Yes, I know it's an unfair image, but it exists nonetheless.
It's the same problem that Sun often has - McNealy's statements are often so immature that people have difficulty taking him seriously. Sometimes ESR's comments also get a little high on vanity and boastfulness, and frankly, all it does is make everyone look immature. Similarly, when linux advocates bitterly bite and scratch, and then carry out an extended argument as to who started the fight, who has apologized how many times, etc. etc. it begins to enter the grey area between amusement and shooting-oneself-in-the-foot-with-remarkable-accu
If you want to propagate a good image of open source, just keep the personality battles out of the picture. Nobody really cares, and it just makes a mockery of evangelism and advocacy.
I normally follow the following unique procedure -
1) Mix 1/2 cup water and milk
2) Bring it to a boil
3) Dunk in the tea leaves (real ones, not the stupid teabag thingie), turn off the heat, keep covered
4) Let it sit for 2-3 minutes
5) Filter using an appropriate mechanism
6) Add your preferred amount of sugar
This was described to me by a guy from India, and it comes out quite strong and flavorful. It, however, is not the l33t connoisseur's methodology, which normally involves boiling water and adding the tea leaves, then waiting for a longer period of time (5-6 mins).
Note - Use actual tea instead of tea bags (preferably stuff you can find in ethnic stores). Also, let the water run for a while from the faucet - the initial body of water tends to be staler and less oxygenated.
An alternative method is as follows:
1) pour desired liquid(s) in said cup and place in a microwave oven.
2) Nuke till it boils (2:38 mins on my 900 Watt Sharp Carousel)
3) Add the tea
4) Wait till it's done.
Historical footnote - Legend has it that tea was invented accidentally when tea leaves drifted into a Chinese emperor's hot water (which always made me wonder why he was drinking hot water and in a place likely to allow leaves to fall in). Just found this -
http://www.aromas.com.au/AllTea.html
Oddly, I couldn't find the British standards institute way of making tea. A search for tea only gives this page :
http://www.bsi.org.uk/bsi/products/standards/de
It does have the wise committee's email addr. Just don't slashdot them asking for tea recipes.
I hereby place the step-by-step tea making code included in this document under the GPL (which can be obtained by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA)
L.
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/love.ht
It's been mathematically proved that the number of all possible combinations of chess moves is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, approximately 10^ 80. This is why the concept of chess being solved once and for all, so that once the first move is made, all the future moves are computed by the other side, resulting in a game with an obvious ending, is not a real possibility.
This is what makes chess interesting.
L.
20% of Silicon Valley startups are founded by immigrants, and 33% of valley engineers/programmers are immigrants. CIA projects require security clearance, and it will be difficult to fund a venture that doesn't involve foreigners at some point.
It may be possible, but it's difficult to populate a startup with exclusively US citizens. I don't think there's a single Silicon valley startup that doesn't employ foreigners.
Of course, there's also the drug test, which a lot of the notoriously liberal Silicon valley crowd might fail.
Finally - there's the question of why someone would want to work for a govt. bureaucracy "startup" when there's a shitload of money to be made working for a real company. Money has no ideology.
There's also a MASSIVE conflict of interest - a venture capital tries to make a mass marketed product which brings in profits, the CIA tries to make a secret product that only it can use. I'm not sure how the secret service can use a product that is freely available to the entire world. This is a direct contradiction.
L.
There was a recent show on NPR about chess playing which involved the players starting off with a blank board, then placing the pieces on it one by one, effectively playing backwards, until finally both ended up with the "normal" initial placement. It struck me as quirky and intriguing. I believe this was on a Harry Shearer show, so it was most likely a parody, but it seems remarkbly similar to reverse engineering on a logical level. Not to mention interesting - have to try it out sometime and see what it's like.
L.
http://www.jaymuggs.demon.co.uk/bishop.htm
In talking of an autistic continuum, we imply a single dimension, in which a condition such as Asperger's syndrome constitutes a milder form of the same underlying disorder that is seen in autism. However, clinical accounts suggest that conditions resembling autism do not differ just in terms of severity, but also in pattern of symptoms.
Thus the label Asperger's syndrome is typically applied to clumsy children with circumscribed interests, whose early language development is not delayed, and who may have a verbal IQ well above performance IQ (Wing, 1981). In contrast, language-impaired children fitting the picture of semantic-pragmatic disorder typically first present with delayed language development and evident comprehension problems, and have a marked IQ discrepancy in favour of performance IQ.
Normally growth patterns in software usage tend to be explosive when it's a new phenomenon with a hungry need - the IBM PC, linux, netscape downloads, yahoo, amazon.com, etc. After the "revolutionary" period has worn off, the rate of growth stabilizes or becomes linear. At some point, it is destined to tend towards flatness, since the number of users is finite.
My guess is since fetch mail was catering to a well established community, it was by definition a smaller subset of a mature growing community, and its rate of growth was likely to be smaller than the parent. Also, it was not revolutionary or filled a major hunger, so it was not likely to grow at a > linear rate.
L.
Actually, the FAA system runs on an IBM S/370 machine with software written in the 1960s. An effort to re-write the whole system was scrapped after 10 years and tens of millions of $. An article in Computerworld described the system as so antiquated that the wires literally crackled from age.
If re-writing the system was so difficult, I wouldn't be surprised if fixing it for Y2K wasn't carried out successfully. See, the people who issue these compliance statements are lawyers or MBA biz execs. Typically, they have no clue about what OS, software, etc. constitutes the system and what exactly the problems are.
As for the airline execs flying on Jan 1, 2000. I know a programmer at American Airlines who chuckled and said there was no way he would fly. Airlines don't handle the scheduling and path determination of flights - collision prevention is done by the FAA (read above.)
Keep in mind that the FAA system doesn't have to schedule 2 planes flying opposite each other - simply having a non-working or disabled system can cause a crash. In today's news - a pilot went down the wrong runway and crashed into a construction zone. I would hate to imagine what would happen if the central system went down and you had 100s of planes flying around without any guidance.