You don't seem to understand. Therefore, I am not going to explain it to you. Go back and re-read what I wrote. The idea is that when you buy the file (after its downloaded) a client application retreives (thru SSL) a private key that's used to decrypt the file you downloaded from BT. The client app decrypts the file, destroys the private key, and merges your client certificate into a predefined space in the binary file, aka DRM.
"Upon completion of the financial transaction, the file is decrypted with the distributor's public key"
This is basically what I said. But in your example the Public Key would still need to be kept secret. In my example, the distributor encrypts w/ their pub key and the dole out their private key after you purchase the file. The priv key is not revealed to the user, and it's downloaded thru an SSL protected connection.
The point is, there would need to be one one single encrypted version of the file that gets distributed. Otherwise they should just run an FTP server.
AFAIK, they're not planning on using your PC to seed the files. They'll probably be using a network that they own, but nevertheless they'll still need to distribute the same exact file thru all of their nodes for the benefits of BT to be had.
They distribute an encrypted version of the file. This file is what's transferred and seeded, etc.
Upon downloading the file, you use a program to unlock it. The program would interact with a web-service. It would charge your credit card, give you a username/password, and it would decrypt the file and merge in your unique signature. You'd never see the key that's used to decrypt the file. It's never stored on your PC and it's encrypted itself with SSL during the key-retrieval.
I'm not suggesting this is how it would work, but I *am* a software developer and this would be how I would probably approach the problem. Loading a file with "thousands of keys" doesn't really jive with how encryption actually works. An encrypted file doesn't store ANY keys, let alone thousands of them.
...But my great grandfather, who went blind at 60 to Glaucoma, was able to identify a denomination with 100% accuracy. It was a dinner-party trick that always delighted the crowd. He lived until 90 and, while I'm not sure if this was an acquired skill, as long as I knew him (the last 10 years of his life), he was never wrong. So there must be SOMETHING to it. I always speculated that it could've been that he could actually feel the boundries of ink in the paper, or something like that. I once thought that he was just guessing based on how worn the bill was, but crisp bills worked just the same.
Also, this was with the pre-clinton era currency.
Maybe he was a freak, but have they actually asked any blind people about this?
Not to mention the fact that if China sold every last dollar bill in their vaults, the US currency would be far from worthless as you seem to imply. It would mean hyper-inflation, but your comment about Bill Gates not being able to afford whatever is just silly. The value of currency is not just related to supply/demand of actual dollars, it's also very closely tied to the credit-worthiness of the US government.
In fact, most of the negative consequences I wrote about would not happen because the dollar would be worthless, they would happen because a huge number of U.S. financial institutions would crumble and leave a vacuum in their wake.
You see, all the large banks, and every large corporation that runs a financing arm (car companies, heavy equipment, etc), basically runs their company on their receivables. That is, they have doled out, say, $5 billion in credit, and they get loans and buy materials, etc, based on their promised revenues. Well, when hyperinflation occurs, all this debt is made worthless.
For the Americans that don't own property, and live in basic poverty with a large amount of debt, this would actually help them. It would, in effect, erase their debt.
The middle class and above would be devastated. Stores would be ghost-towns outside of the essentials of food, etc, and a lot of looting. This would further supress the economy, and this is what would lead to the bulk of the problems.
The simple fact is that it hurts China and Chinas interests so much that it will *never* happen. A slow, gradual draw-down would be the only way to go.
And if China did try to offload a large-enough quantity at once to scare the worlds central banks, I would be surprised if some of the wealthier CBs (Japan & the EU for example) would pool resources and purchase the entire lot before it goes "on the market."
In other words, China has no leverage on us. China buys our debt, and we buy their products, and the cessation of either would cause a lot of problems for both.
Does anyone know how/if this was related to their GroupWise product?
GroupWise is far from Exchange in nearly every possible measure, and the client makes one long for Outlook, but if nothing else I'd think it would be a good start. While I've never worked on an enterprise-class client/server email/communication suite, I imagine that it's icebergian in that most of the code is not user-facing.
Open Source GroupWise and "part it out" if nothing else.
Wow, you really have no understanding of how worldwide currency systems actually work.
First, you should understand that more American currency sits in banks outside the US than banks within the US. That is hard currency, actual paper bills, not just "value." All of this money would be lost. All of it. Trillions of dollars of money which is the oil that lubricates the worldwide economy.
Everyone of these countries would suffer a great deal. The entire worldwide economy would collapse. I mean collapse. You show that you have no understanding of the gravity of this scenario when you say "the rest of the world would lose out a bit."
Every major economic power in the world uses fiat currency. That is, the currency has no intrinsic value. Loans and financing the world over are secured with US dollars in a bank vault somewhere. Once those are worthless, worldwide banking and lending falls into a crisis. Obviously not ALL loans are backed in this manner, but so many, for such a high amount, that central banks in europe and asia would have a crisis.
Countries that have a large amount of exports to the US would watch their currency collapse before their eyes. Their economy would implode.
Food prices the world over would skyrocket. The US is the single largest exporter of food. Much more than you seem to understand.
Oil markets could not just simply "switch to the euro" and saying so makes you seem naive. What about existing transactions? What about credit-based transactions? (And nearly all oil sales are credit based. Nobody is sending a boatload of dollar bills to get a boatload of oil) What about futures? The economies of the middle east--which rely almost exclusively on large amounts of US hard currency to run their economy--would crumble.
The worldwide import/export market would be crippled. China would lose TRILLIONS. Furthermore, the Chinese currency which, as I said in my OP, is the YUAN not the YEN, cannot simply be "re pegged" to the Euro. Do you think that they can just say "Hello. Yesterday 1 Yuan was worth 1 Dollar but today 1 Yuan is worth 1 Euro" ??
I'm not trying to be a prick, but your scenario and your explanation of it is just asinine. If China sold off its US Hard Currency the world economy--not just the USA--would be DEVESTATED. And the countries that trade for food would be hit the hardest. That's the Middle east, asia, and Europe to a lesser extent.
This is the single biggest reason why China would never declare war on the US. They need us more than we need them.
By the way, the value of the Euro would plunge, also.
I know this is slashdot, but do some homework before you post moronic things like this. That way I wouldn't have to embarrass you.
And you actually think that those 8000 are well maintained, well staffed, and reliable?
I have no problems letting them THINK they are, but I have serious doubts. How many nuclear technicians do you think stayed in the Russian Military after being strung along for the better part of a decade with little to no pay?
The Russian military is derelict. Their nuclear program has been grossly underfunded for so long that you could hardly consider their missiles "battle ready." We spend an enormous amount of our defense budget maintaining our missiles, silos and C&C systems. We're not doing that for novelty.
Furthermore, the US Nuclear arsenal is head and shoulders above the Russians, even if they had proper maintenance. We have more missiles and they are more powerful. We have MIRVs. We have dozens of subs deployed at any given time with nuclear delivery systems.
The Russian system was never centralized. That means they need guys in the silos to launch their missiles. How many silos are out of service? Of the ones that are in service, how many have been maintained properly? Of those, how many are manned? Of those, how reliable and well-trained are the officers manning them?
This same logic applies to all of the Russian military. It's frozen in time in 1985. No new air or ground systems, problems getting spare-parts, and few trained mechanics for certain technologies. Their armed forces have lost their institutional memory. They are in shambles.
And don't be naive about the defense spending. Is the "military industrial complex" a powerful lobby? Yes. But there a lot of other very powerful lobbyists. The "overinvestment" (your word) in the military was largely due to the Cold war. And considering we won, I think it was money well spent. It's difficult to say if Russia would've been more aggressive if they felt the U.S. was weaker than they were, but it's not a crazy notion.
As a percentage of our federal budget and a percentage of the GDP, our defense spending is way down from the cold-war highs.
[I must have hit the "Post Anon" button when I tried to hit "Quote"]
<quote>What do you suppose would happen if China were to start dumping all those trade deficit US Dollars it's accumulated? China has quite a lot of leverage over the USA because of our fiscal problems.</quote>
You really don't understand what you're talking about.
The very moment that the Chinese central bank HINTED that they were planning on diversifying their hard currency holdings, the US dollar would bottom-out. This would happen before the guy could even clear his throat. And China would lose hundreds of billions of dollars because the metric tons of cash money would all of a sudden be basically worthless.
In other words, they have no leverage. Furthermore, the Chinese currency is pegged to the dollar. Which means the weaker the dollar, the weaker the Yuan.
Not to mention the fact that the global oil market is also done in US Dollars, which would have some very interesting impacts on Russia, Venezuala, and of course all the Opec countries. These people wouldn't like China very much. Neither would any of the other first-world countries who 1) also hold lots of US hard currency and 2) Rely on the US economically.
And when it comes down to it, if no goods were being exported from China the world would run out of electronics and textiles. If no goods were being exported from the United States the world would run out of food.
The newest version of Naturally Speaking doesn't require any training. And according to the reviews I've read, it's better out of the box than it's previous version was after an hour of training.
Furthermore, the company announced that it's next version would be able to accurately transcribe a conversation between two people without getting confused.
I think you're going to see speech-powered devices increase in popularity dramatically now that there's no training involved. The expansion of voice-powered systems in cars, cockpits, home security systems, etc, is probably the logical first-step since it's already being done to some extent. I think these niche markets will let the technology mature while rolling it out to the masses. Along these lines, I think that transcription in cell phones for SMS messages will also become commonplace. And once speech-recog is used by hundreds of millions of people every day you'll see progress at an ever-increasing clip.
"If you want to innovate in the office arena, you will not be able to make something that looks like people expect"
I find it unlikely that you wrote that with a straight-face. It must be humor you're going after.
I could write an essay on how many wrong things are in this one sentence alone. For example
1) If you want to INNOVATE in the office arena, you shouldn't start by COPYING MICROSOFT. Anyone concerned with actually *innovating* wouldn't be using the Microsoft GUI controls.
2) Nobody in the world is EXPECTING a ribbon. In fact, many/.ers think this ribbon idea is not a good one. I disagree, but I do admit that this isn't a given. A lot of people will wonder where their menus went after they install this software.
3) Your entire point is "Microsoft is putting restrictions on what they are giving away for free." Give me a break! They're GIVING IT AWAY!
Here's a good analogy: The General Public License. What if I wanted to download GPL software, make a couple changes, keep the hybrid codebase proprietary, and sell the software commercially. This would be a violation of the GPL and a no-no in the eyes of the OS community. The reason is simple: In exchange for my FREE USAGE of VALUABLE IP, I have to respect the copyrights of the owner. If the copyright puts restrictions on the usage, it's fair game. It's the price you pay in exchange for using the software.
I'm getting a slight hint that you might not be a native english speaker. I mean, your writing is very good, and whether I'm right or wrong that's not the issue. The point I'm making is that there's a saying in English that you may not have heard of: There's no such thing as a free lunch.
"And this discouragement is based on them fearing competition"
Why would you say that? Wouldn't any company not want competition if they had the choice?
"it is more like black and decker saying "here is our drill, you can use it as you like, excepting you cant use it to create anything that will compete with our products"
Well, sort of. It's more like Black and Decker saying "Here, this is a FREE DRILL and you don't have to PAY ANYTHING FOR IT and you can build ANYTHING YOU WANT just as long as you don't compete with something else that we make" What's the problem with that?
"these kinds of things are stifling innovation"
Uhh... No. I disagree with you. Do you know what WOULD stifle innovation? Not being able to control your own IP. Microsoft INNOVATED here. They have invested money to create something that they feel will give them an advantage in the market place. They should (and do) have the right to say how and where their IP is used. If companies couldn't do that, you'd see a lot less innovation.
The only reason to innovate is to make money. If you remove that, innovation is useless. Nobody is writing UI elements for the betterment of mankind.
"If I implement something which looks like their look and feel, but I have never seen their best-practices document, then what basis does MS have to say that I'm not allowed to do that? I would argue, none at all."
And you would probably be the winner of that lawsuit.
A good example of this is when Jeep sued GM based on GM copying the grill used in the Jeep Cherokee for the Hummer H2.
Jeep lost that lawsuit. The Hummer H2 sold great. Now Jeep has an SUV that looks a LOT like a mini Hummer.
The moral of the story: A corporation doesn't concern itself with hypocrisy. It lives for one reason online: to be an engine of profit. If Microsoft using that defense against apple helped Microsoft make profit, it was the right thing for the company to do. If this caveat in their gui license helps them make profit, again, it is the right thing for the company to do.
They own IP. They are giving their IP to anyone that wants to use it. The only caveat is that you cannot use THEIR IP, that THEY DEVELOPED, and that THEY OWN, to compete with them.
This is LOGICAL to me. It's only not logical when a person is Anti Microsoft and thinks that Microsoft is somehow much worse than your average corporation.
Please. What if Apple decided to license its OS for things like, say, a DVR, but they had the restriction that you couldn't use it in a general-purpose PC. Would that be a problem?
Yes, that was indeed a good interview. I'd never heard about the pirates attacking the port of rome before. Very well done, but it's Morning Edition. It's *always* well done.
And the analogy to America was proper, and interesting.
But I don't think it's a proper analogy for a company. And this is because you can easily compare the USA to Rome. Many of the same constructs. As the author pointed out, the American system is based on Rome.
But saying that vendor lock-in and patents are a sign that Microsoft is past it's zenith is silly. Look at IBM, for example, and Apple, and Xerox, and the list goes on. Companies are a lot more agile than civilizations. They can control their destiny in ways that a country can't.
I know that this is what you *want* to believe, and you very well could be correct, but there's no evidence supporting it. Every OS they've released has been more successful than the last. Sales and profits still grow at a healthy pace. By the standard of an American Corporation, they are WILDLY successful. Their recent performance only starts to look bad when you compare it to the standards they set 10 years ago.
But that tends to happen. The higher your annual sales, the harder it is to grow 5% a year. The larger your float, the harder it is to grow your stock price. This is inevitable.
Not to mention, the things you mentioned (lock in, etc) were far worse before the Anti Trust suit, which is the period that you must consider to be their zenith.
I'm just being a realist. I don't love or hate Microsoft. I can personally accept that they've done good things for technology and they've done bad things. Just like most other companies. And if Microsoft was showing any indication that it was about to boom or bust I wouldn't have any reason to contradict it. But right now, their ship is running just fine. People that point to Vista shipping late like it's some indication of failure at Microsoft is silly to me. I don't think they've ever shipped an OS on time and it hasn't really hurt them very much.
You just made the very point that you were trying to contradict.
My definition of success is accomplishing your goals. One of Joels goals is obviously to have fun and make money building a successful, sustainable software company that's a place where developers like to work.
And you admit yourself, everything he does is about "generating business." That is, everything he's done is about accomplishing his goal.
The problem is that, according to your post, you define success and intelligence as creating soemthing "truly unique" and "inspiring." I don't think joel cares a lick about creating inspiring software. He's developing a company, not a product.
I suppose the black-hat, basement-hacker, slashdot mentality doesn't consider business development to be difficult or important, but the rest of the world values it pretty highly.
Slashdot Mirror
And as soon as someone cracks the PGP client app then PGP is useless to.
The thing is, it's much easier said than done.
Don't be naive.
You don't seem to understand. Therefore, I am not going to explain it to you. Go back and re-read what I wrote. The idea is that when you buy the file (after its downloaded) a client application retreives (thru SSL) a private key that's used to decrypt the file you downloaded from BT. The client app decrypts the file, destroys the private key, and merges your client certificate into a predefined space in the binary file, aka DRM.
"Upon completion of the financial transaction, the file is decrypted with the distributor's public key"
This is basically what I said. But in your example the Public Key would still need to be kept secret. In my example, the distributor encrypts w/ their pub key and the dole out their private key after you purchase the file. The priv key is not revealed to the user, and it's downloaded thru an SSL protected connection.
The point is, there would need to be one one single encrypted version of the file that gets distributed. Otherwise they should just run an FTP server.
AFAIK, they're not planning on using your PC to seed the files. They'll probably be using a network that they own, but nevertheless they'll still need to distribute the same exact file thru all of their nodes for the benefits of BT to be had.
SSL hasn't been cracked in 10 years and I'm sure it's not for lack of trying.
This is like saying "A dvd john type could just break AES encryption"
Please. Let's try to have at least a minor understanding of the subject matter before espousing our opinions as facts?
They distribute an encrypted version of the file. This file is what's transferred and seeded, etc.
Upon downloading the file, you use a program to unlock it. The program would interact with a web-service. It would charge your credit card, give you a username/password, and it would decrypt the file and merge in your unique signature. You'd never see the key that's used to decrypt the file. It's never stored on your PC and it's encrypted itself with SSL during the key-retrieval.
I'm not suggesting this is how it would work, but I *am* a software developer and this would be how I would probably approach the problem. Loading a file with "thousands of keys" doesn't really jive with how encryption actually works. An encrypted file doesn't store ANY keys, let alone thousands of them.
...But my great grandfather, who went blind at 60 to Glaucoma, was able to identify a denomination with 100% accuracy. It was a dinner-party trick that always delighted the crowd. He lived until 90 and, while I'm not sure if this was an acquired skill, as long as I knew him (the last 10 years of his life), he was never wrong. So there must be SOMETHING to it. I always speculated that it could've been that he could actually feel the boundries of ink in the paper, or something like that. I once thought that he was just guessing based on how worn the bill was, but crisp bills worked just the same.
Also, this was with the pre-clinton era currency.
Maybe he was a freak, but have they actually asked any blind people about this?
Not to mention the fact that if China sold every last dollar bill in their vaults, the US currency would be far from worthless as you seem to imply. It would mean hyper-inflation, but your comment about Bill Gates not being able to afford whatever is just silly. The value of currency is not just related to supply/demand of actual dollars, it's also very closely tied to the credit-worthiness of the US government.
In fact, most of the negative consequences I wrote about would not happen because the dollar would be worthless, they would happen because a huge number of U.S. financial institutions would crumble and leave a vacuum in their wake.
You see, all the large banks, and every large corporation that runs a financing arm (car companies, heavy equipment, etc), basically runs their company on their receivables. That is, they have doled out, say, $5 billion in credit, and they get loans and buy materials, etc, based on their promised revenues. Well, when hyperinflation occurs, all this debt is made worthless.
For the Americans that don't own property, and live in basic poverty with a large amount of debt, this would actually help them. It would, in effect, erase their debt.
The middle class and above would be devastated. Stores would be ghost-towns outside of the essentials of food, etc, and a lot of looting. This would further supress the economy, and this is what would lead to the bulk of the problems.
The simple fact is that it hurts China and Chinas interests so much that it will *never* happen. A slow, gradual draw-down would be the only way to go.
And if China did try to offload a large-enough quantity at once to scare the worlds central banks, I would be surprised if some of the wealthier CBs (Japan & the EU for example) would pool resources and purchase the entire lot before it goes "on the market."
In other words, China has no leverage on us. China buys our debt, and we buy their products, and the cessation of either would cause a lot of problems for both.
Does anyone know how/if this was related to their GroupWise product?
GroupWise is far from Exchange in nearly every possible measure, and the client makes one long for Outlook, but if nothing else I'd think it would be a good start. While I've never worked on an enterprise-class client/server email/communication suite, I imagine that it's icebergian in that most of the code is not user-facing.
Open Source GroupWise and "part it out" if nothing else.
Wow, you really have no understanding of how worldwide currency systems actually work.
First, you should understand that more American currency sits in banks outside the US than banks within the US. That is hard currency, actual paper bills, not just "value." All of this money would be lost. All of it. Trillions of dollars of money which is the oil that lubricates the worldwide economy.
Everyone of these countries would suffer a great deal. The entire worldwide economy would collapse. I mean collapse. You show that you have no understanding of the gravity of this scenario when you say "the rest of the world would lose out a bit."
Every major economic power in the world uses fiat currency. That is, the currency has no intrinsic value. Loans and financing the world over are secured with US dollars in a bank vault somewhere. Once those are worthless, worldwide banking and lending falls into a crisis. Obviously not ALL loans are backed in this manner, but so many, for such a high amount, that central banks in europe and asia would have a crisis.
Countries that have a large amount of exports to the US would watch their currency collapse before their eyes. Their economy would implode.
Food prices the world over would skyrocket. The US is the single largest exporter of food. Much more than you seem to understand.
Oil markets could not just simply "switch to the euro" and saying so makes you seem naive. What about existing transactions? What about credit-based transactions? (And nearly all oil sales are credit based. Nobody is sending a boatload of dollar bills to get a boatload of oil) What about futures? The economies of the middle east--which rely almost exclusively on large amounts of US hard currency to run their economy--would crumble.
The worldwide import/export market would be crippled. China would lose TRILLIONS. Furthermore, the Chinese currency which, as I said in my OP, is the YUAN not the YEN, cannot simply be "re pegged" to the Euro. Do you think that they can just say "Hello. Yesterday 1 Yuan was worth 1 Dollar but today 1 Yuan is worth 1 Euro" ??
I'm not trying to be a prick, but your scenario and your explanation of it is just asinine. If China sold off its US Hard Currency the world economy--not just the USA--would be DEVESTATED. And the countries that trade for food would be hit the hardest. That's the Middle east, asia, and Europe to a lesser extent.
This is the single biggest reason why China would never declare war on the US. They need us more than we need them.
By the way, the value of the Euro would plunge, also.
I know this is slashdot, but do some homework before you post moronic things like this. That way I wouldn't have to embarrass you.
Come on. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Cheap Speech is a lot more realistic.
Riiight. You an your fancy arithmetic will NEVER pry the cold hard truth from my mind.
Besides, it's clear to everyone that you, sir, are a complete moron.
And you actually think that those 8000 are well maintained, well staffed, and reliable?
I have no problems letting them THINK they are, but I have serious doubts. How many nuclear technicians do you think stayed in the Russian Military after being strung along for the better part of a decade with little to no pay?
The Russian military is derelict. Their nuclear program has been grossly underfunded for so long that you could hardly consider their missiles "battle ready." We spend an enormous amount of our defense budget maintaining our missiles, silos and C&C systems. We're not doing that for novelty.
Furthermore, the US Nuclear arsenal is head and shoulders above the Russians, even if they had proper maintenance. We have more missiles and they are more powerful. We have MIRVs. We have dozens of subs deployed at any given time with nuclear delivery systems.
The Russian system was never centralized. That means they need guys in the silos to launch their missiles. How many silos are out of service? Of the ones that are in service, how many have been maintained properly? Of those, how many are manned? Of those, how reliable and well-trained are the officers manning them?
This same logic applies to all of the Russian military. It's frozen in time in 1985. No new air or ground systems, problems getting spare-parts, and few trained mechanics for certain technologies. Their armed forces have lost their institutional memory. They are in shambles.
And don't be naive about the defense spending. Is the "military industrial complex" a powerful lobby? Yes. But there a lot of other very powerful lobbyists. The "overinvestment" (your word) in the military was largely due to the Cold war. And considering we won, I think it was money well spent. It's difficult to say if Russia would've been more aggressive if they felt the U.S. was weaker than they were, but it's not a crazy notion.
As a percentage of our federal budget and a percentage of the GDP, our defense spending is way down from the cold-war highs.
[I must have hit the "Post Anon" button when I tried to hit "Quote"]
<quote>What do you suppose would happen if China were to start dumping all those trade deficit US Dollars it's accumulated? China has quite a lot of leverage over the USA because of our fiscal problems.</quote>
You really don't understand what you're talking about.
The very moment that the Chinese central bank HINTED that they were planning on diversifying their hard currency holdings, the US dollar would bottom-out. This would happen before the guy could even clear his throat. And China would lose hundreds of billions of dollars because the metric tons of cash money would all of a sudden be basically worthless.
In other words, they have no leverage. Furthermore, the Chinese currency is pegged to the dollar. Which means the weaker the dollar, the weaker the Yuan.
Not to mention the fact that the global oil market is also done in US Dollars, which would have some very interesting impacts on Russia, Venezuala, and of course all the Opec countries. These people wouldn't like China very much. Neither would any of the other first-world countries who 1) also hold lots of US hard currency and 2) Rely on the US economically.
And when it comes down to it, if no goods were being exported from China the world would run out of electronics and textiles. If no goods were being exported from the United States the world would run out of food.
China has no leverage. Stop perpetuating myths.
...But then he couldn't bitch...
The newest version of Naturally Speaking doesn't require any training. And according to the reviews I've read, it's better out of the box than it's previous version was after an hour of training.
Furthermore, the company announced that it's next version would be able to accurately transcribe a conversation between two people without getting confused.
I think you're going to see speech-powered devices increase in popularity dramatically now that there's no training involved. The expansion of voice-powered systems in cars, cockpits, home security systems, etc, is probably the logical first-step since it's already being done to some extent. I think these niche markets will let the technology mature while rolling it out to the masses. Along these lines, I think that transcription in cell phones for SMS messages will also become commonplace. And once speech-recog is used by hundreds of millions of people every day you'll see progress at an ever-increasing clip.
"If you want to innovate in the office arena, you will not be able to make something that looks like people expect"
/.ers think this ribbon idea is not a good one. I disagree, but I do admit that this isn't a given. A lot of people will wonder where their menus went after they install this software.
I find it unlikely that you wrote that with a straight-face. It must be humor you're going after.
I could write an essay on how many wrong things are in this one sentence alone. For example
1) If you want to INNOVATE in the office arena, you shouldn't start by COPYING MICROSOFT. Anyone concerned with actually *innovating* wouldn't be using the Microsoft GUI controls.
2) Nobody in the world is EXPECTING a ribbon. In fact, many
3) Your entire point is "Microsoft is putting restrictions on what they are giving away for free." Give me a break! They're GIVING IT AWAY!
Here's a good analogy: The General Public License. What if I wanted to download GPL software, make a couple changes, keep the hybrid codebase proprietary, and sell the software commercially. This would be a violation of the GPL and a no-no in the eyes of the OS community. The reason is simple: In exchange for my FREE USAGE of VALUABLE IP, I have to respect the copyrights of the owner. If the copyright puts restrictions on the usage, it's fair game. It's the price you pay in exchange for using the software.
I'm getting a slight hint that you might not be a native english speaker. I mean, your writing is very good, and whether I'm right or wrong that's not the issue. The point I'm making is that there's a saying in English that you may not have heard of: There's no such thing as a free lunch.
"And this discouragement is based on them fearing competition"
Why would you say that? Wouldn't any company not want competition if they had the choice?
"it is more like black and decker saying "here is our drill, you can use it as you like, excepting you cant use it to create anything that will compete with our products"
Well, sort of. It's more like Black and Decker saying "Here, this is a FREE DRILL and you don't have to PAY ANYTHING FOR IT and you can build ANYTHING YOU WANT just as long as you don't compete with something else that we make" What's the problem with that?
"these kinds of things are stifling innovation"
Uhh... No. I disagree with you. Do you know what WOULD stifle innovation? Not being able to control your own IP. Microsoft INNOVATED here. They have invested money to create something that they feel will give them an advantage in the market place. They should (and do) have the right to say how and where their IP is used. If companies couldn't do that, you'd see a lot less innovation.
The only reason to innovate is to make money. If you remove that, innovation is useless. Nobody is writing UI elements for the betterment of mankind.
"If I implement something which looks like their look and feel, but I have never seen their best-practices document, then what basis does MS
have to say that I'm not allowed to do that? I would argue, none at all."
And you would probably be the winner of that lawsuit.
A good example of this is when Jeep sued GM based on GM copying the grill used in the Jeep Cherokee for the Hummer H2.
Jeep lost that lawsuit. The Hummer H2 sold great. Now Jeep has an SUV that looks a LOT like a mini Hummer.
The moral of the story: A corporation doesn't concern itself with hypocrisy. It lives for one reason online: to be an engine of profit. If Microsoft using that defense against apple helped Microsoft make profit, it was the right thing for the company to do. If this caveat in their gui license helps them make profit, again, it is the right thing for the company to do.
"...the small footprint that got you hooked on Firefox?"
Are you using the same Firefox that I am?
I like the browser just fine, and I'm using it right now, but IE6 has a much smaller footprint.
This is silly. Corporate America isn't daycare.
They own IP. They are giving their IP to anyone that wants to use it. The only caveat is that you cannot use THEIR IP, that THEY DEVELOPED, and that THEY OWN, to compete with them.
This is LOGICAL to me. It's only not logical when a person is Anti Microsoft and thinks that Microsoft is somehow much worse than your average corporation.
Please. What if Apple decided to license its OS for things like, say, a DVR, but they had the restriction that you couldn't use it in a general-purpose PC. Would that be a problem?
Yes, that was indeed a good interview. I'd never heard about the pirates attacking the port of rome before. Very well done, but it's Morning Edition. It's *always* well done.
And the analogy to America was proper, and interesting.
But I don't think it's a proper analogy for a company. And this is because you can easily compare the USA to Rome. Many of the same constructs. As the author pointed out, the American system is based on Rome.
But saying that vendor lock-in and patents are a sign that Microsoft is past it's zenith is silly. Look at IBM, for example, and Apple, and Xerox, and the list goes on. Companies are a lot more agile than civilizations. They can control their destiny in ways that a country can't.
I know that this is what you *want* to believe, and you very well could be correct, but there's no evidence supporting it. Every OS they've released has been more successful than the last. Sales and profits still grow at a healthy pace. By the standard of an American Corporation, they are WILDLY successful. Their recent performance only starts to look bad when you compare it to the standards they set 10 years ago.
But that tends to happen. The higher your annual sales, the harder it is to grow 5% a year. The larger your float, the harder it is to grow your stock price. This is inevitable.
Not to mention, the things you mentioned (lock in, etc) were far worse before the Anti Trust suit, which is the period that you must consider to be their zenith.
I'm just being a realist. I don't love or hate Microsoft. I can personally accept that they've done good things for technology and they've done bad things. Just like most other companies. And if Microsoft was showing any indication that it was about to boom or bust I wouldn't have any reason to contradict it. But right now, their ship is running just fine. People that point to Vista shipping late like it's some indication of failure at Microsoft is silly to me. I don't think they've ever shipped an OS on time and it hasn't really hurt them very much.
You just made the very point that you were trying to contradict.
My definition of success is accomplishing your goals. One of Joels goals is obviously to have fun and make money building a successful, sustainable software company that's a place where developers like to work.
And you admit yourself, everything he does is about "generating business." That is, everything he's done is about accomplishing his goal.
The problem is that, according to your post, you define success and intelligence as creating soemthing "truly unique" and "inspiring." I don't think joel cares a lick about creating inspiring software. He's developing a company, not a product.
I suppose the black-hat, basement-hacker, slashdot mentality doesn't consider business development to be difficult or important, but the rest of the world values it pretty highly.
"the dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today?"
I'm sorry, but your flair for the dramatic is a little much, even by slashdot standards.
"dying rattle breaths?" "unable to compete?"
Please. Aside from the notorious cash reserves, they're still making profits hand over fist.
When they start posting red ink, then we'll talk, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you...