No, it's not. If you don't understand why after a lengthy process including an appeal to a conservative US Circuit Court of Appeals, nothing I can say here will help you.
The Polish invented the bombes, while in France where they'd fled after Germany had flattened already flat-enough Poland. That's why it's spelled "bombe" not "bomb", among other things.
They delivered a replica they'd built of the original version of the machine (a 3-rotor clone used by the Army and Luftwaffe, not the 4-rotor version used by the Navy, and not stolen from the Germans as has been so frequently reported) plus their plans to link up three of them to help crack codes.
The Poles had already cracked the German Army's use of Enigma before they arrived in France. Sheer mathematical brilliance, aided by pre-war training of German operators who the Poles correctly guessed used successive keys (AAA, AAB etc) enabled them to figure out weaknesses in the encryption.
Their manual techniques (based on stacks of paper with defined patterns of holes) worked but was, of course, very slow. The Bombes sped things up and of course the electronic computers built by the British sped things up even more.
The four-rotor Navy version took much more computational power and the Navy frequently switched rotors, were much smarter about key management, and in general made life rough for Bletchly Park.
While I don't know if such efforts are successful or not, the OpenACS project I lead is directly oriented to this space (and other common-interest communities).
I'd say that thus far such communities most naturally grow around subjects of global interest (such as photo.net), which spawned the codebase that grew to be OpenACS.
But I wouldn't give up on communities of more narrow interest. After all, in wetware space frequently membership to meetings is depressingly low. Yet... much can be done by dedication, knowlege, and persistence.
Especially since such ignorance includes missing the essential fact that corporations are not an invention of the Left, but capitalists who, on the whole, tend to be rather Conservative.
No, it's not shutting them up at all. The ruling merely says that the suit attempting to prove that Nike's ads are false and misleading can go forward.
Nike was trying to preemptively strike down the suit before the substantial issues in the case could be heard.
Yes, but you don't sign a license when you pick up the latest phone book from your porch every year. There's no EULA, either.
The phone book is protected by copyright law and nothing else. MS is making you sign a license. A contract. An agreement. Maybe that last phrase is the easiest to understand - when you sign an agreement you are agreeing to the terms. That's the whole point of having an agreement/contract/license in the first place.
Which is exactly the thinking which has led to undetected buffer overruns being the most common bug leading to break-ins over the net.
Our industry as a whole hasn't outgrown its need for training wheels. The argument that professional programmers don't need safety nets like bounds checking and the like was being made twenty, twenty-five years ago and was as stupid then as it is now.
Amateurs don't need safety nets because no one uses their code and no one cares if it breaks.
Professionals do, though. People use the code professionals write. When I'm riding on an airplane I care if the software breaks.
The CIA's primary role is to examine information from a wide variety of sources and attempt to categorize and where possible act to mitigate short-term and long-term threats to the security of the United States. Given that their job is akin to predicting the future, and given that even with tremendous resources, predicting the future is exceedingly difficult, the CIA will miss a lot of things that look obvious in hindsight (Al-Quaeda was planning an attack on NYC!).So the public says "shame on you, CIA, for not spotting that obvious threat!" When was the last time they were right?
Heh...sorry for the rant. This Microsoft "admission" is something that's so obvious to people in software development. I'm glad someone realized that was a point they could make against Microsoft.
It's important because Gates had not yielded the point in the first round of cross-examination.
Gates was reminded that an earlier witness for the States had testified that it would be possible to put together a stripped-down version (some CS prof who was given access to the source in order to prepare his testimony).
Gates said the earlier witness was wrong.
Gates was asked if the court should really be expected to believe him rather than the witness. Gates answered to the effect that "I know the Windows product..."
Now the attorney for the states has apparently brought up XP Embedded explictly and Gates was forced to yield.
The attorney for the states has been attacking the credibility of Gates's answers on several issues, for instance his claim that MicroSoft will withdraw Windows from the market if the states prevail.
So the point isn't the unsurprising (to software engineers) point that Windows XP could be modularized (given that it has already been modularized).
The point is that the attorney for the states has destroyed the credibility of Gates earlier testimony on this issue.
Which may well undermine the credibility of much of the rest of Gates testimony.
The attorney for the states has also been quite successful in undermining the credibility of several other witnesses for Microsoft.
The effect of diminishing the credibility of Gates and other MS witnesses might be huge when the Judge considers her ruling.
Or it might not... the fact that the DOJ and MS are in agreement on the proposed remedy is something the Judge won't be able to ignore entirely.
No, not exactly. The law is supposed to ensure that a settlement strips the offender of the fruits of its illegal behavior. Doing so is bound to help their competitors, albeit indirectly.
Given that Gates testified one day earlier, that it was impossible, and made similar claims in his 163 page written testimony, it is an important issue.
But of course from reading your response we can tell that you haven't followed Gates testimony but are just hand-waving, can't we?
Well, you're right about falling in love with mass transit when travelling abroad, but other than Japan, who has gone the monorail route?
Steel-on-steel (dual rail) is more efficient and doesn't require any additional pylon space on the ground if it is elevated. Seattle's existing monorail cars are just circa-1960s subway cars (it was built in the 60s, do you expect circa-2000 subway cars?)
Still... anything's better than driving a car in Seattle. The Sounder's a good idea, pity your regional governments are far behind in schedule and embarrassingly over budget (perhaps a true regional government like our Metro down in Portland would help?) You've got a brand-new commuter rail system that has standing room only boarding during morning and evening rush hours and a third set of trains that are late. Track projects that are late. Etc.
This, actually, is probably one of the appeals of monorail. New infrastructure needs to be built, which means you can't be held hostage as some might argue BNSF does to the Sounder project.
Bombardier has built cars for Portland transit, though I don't remember if they're light rail or busses or trolleys. We've got too many transit systems here, can't remember who built what:)
Meanwhile, Portland Oregon, to the south, with our "repressive" intensive city planning, urban boundary, land-use planning measures and all that, manages to build light-rail segment after segment more or less on budget, more or less on time, and with ridership above estimates.
Clearly we're a bunch of gawddamned Godless commies compared to the good, honest, business-uber-alles people of Seattle, aren't we?
They won't make it out to the suburbs, after all...
"We want them to think it's like a ride at Disneyland," said Bob Broadbent, who leads the project, "not public transportation."
DisneyVegas (or is it VegasWorld?) can afford mass transit of this type, it certainly doesn't fit the real world any more than its extravagent use of water in a desert that gets less than 10" a year (the definition of a desert!) could be supported without its financial underpinnings as a destination resort.
Monorails are innefficient which is one of the main reasons why they've not been adopted. As this poster says, they have tires and tires on concrete, whether they grip the road or grip a concrete i-beam, are inherently less efficient and require more frequent replacement than good old steel-on-steel rail.
Elevating saves money, but steel-on-steel rail can be elevated, too.
So... the motivation here is not only to reduce congestion but to do so via 1960s technology which, not having been adopted mainstream for very good reasons, is still exotic and therefore fitting for a tourist destination.
I'm not knocking it... it seems ideal for Las Vegas (just as buses coming down from NYC and urban NJ seem ideal technology for Atlantic City).
But if anyone thinks this portends a change in thinking as to the future of mass transit... better get Disney or the mob involved before adopting monorail as your savior from congestion!
I do most of my software development on my Dell Laptop these days, typically running Linux, Oracle or Postgres (depending on project or client) and AOLserver if I'm doing web/db stuff.
I love the portability. I've been working out of my house for about fifteen years, and my current laptop is the first machine I've owned that truly lets me work where I want to work. When in town, that typically means local coffee shops, where I've met several other people who do the same thing.
I owned the first portable Unix system out there, an old Sony News with a monochrome display, 240MB SCSI hard drive, 24 MB RAM, MIPS 3000 CPU, and built in ethernet. Not bad for the late 1980s. It weighed a ton (20 lbs? something like that) but fit under an airline seat.
That introduced me to the notion that portable computing was reaching the point where professional software engineers could consider cutting loose from traditional work environments.
Today's laptops are amazingly good. Oracle on a laptop? I would've laughed ten years ago.
I bought my Dell refurbished, saving about 30% while still getting the same 3 yr warranty they offer for new machines. If you can find a refurbished machine that fits your needs you can save a few bucks this way.
Mine will be three years old this summer, and it's starting to show slight signs of flakiness.
I'm not particularly hard on it but I do use it for several hours nearly every day, lug it around in my bookbag along with a bunch of other junk, sling it under the seat on airplanes, in the trunk of the car on road trips, etc.
I almost never use the big padded carrying case I bought with it. The plastic's fairly well marked up from traveling snuggled next to camera bodies and the like, so it is subjected to a certain amount of wear and tear.
But it continues to work, day in and day out. Can't ask for more!
Mine has a 14.1" screen. A friend has a more recent Inspiron with a 15" screen and it's noticably more bulky and heavier than my Latitude. Not sure I'd trade the screen space for the additional bulk, though obviously no screen can be too big.
For reasons that make sense. If I forgo $100 in income, I'm not paying tax on that income. If you could deduct the $100 as a charitable deduction you'd have a double tax savings (once for the deduction, once the tax you didn't pay on the income you didn't accept).
After spending much of yesterday removing the Nimda virus from a friend's computer, I have to laugh at claims that Window's is easy for the neophyte to use while Linux isn't.
My friend went to MIT on a full scholarship (civil engineering) and to Tufts on a tuition scholarship (environmental engineering). While she has no sysadmin skills she's neither neophtye nor stupid.
Yet without my help I doubt she would've been able to defeat Nimda in any reasonable amount of time.
As soon as ESRi releases ArcGIS for Linux (hopefully later this year) she's switching. It will be easier than learning to dodge, avoid, and when necessary remove all the friggin' viruses, worms, and other nasties that keep cropping up in the Windows world. Her GIS tools are the only thing keeping her on Windows. Other than that she only needs a web browser, e-mail client, and Open Office, no problem.
Yeah, I like some of their reasoning. If you run Windows 2000 users only need one username/password. If you deploy on Linux users need two, one for Windows, one for Linux...
But wait... what if we're only using Linux servers and have no Win2K servers at all? Hmmmm....
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not. If you don't understand why after a lengthy process including an appeal to a conservative US Circuit Court of Appeals, nothing I can say here will help you.
They delivered a replica they'd built of the original version of the machine (a 3-rotor clone used by the Army and Luftwaffe, not the 4-rotor version used by the Navy, and not stolen from the Germans as has been so frequently reported) plus their plans to link up three of them to help crack codes.
The Poles had already cracked the German Army's use of Enigma before they arrived in France. Sheer mathematical brilliance, aided by pre-war training of German operators who the Poles correctly guessed used successive keys (AAA, AAB etc) enabled them to figure out weaknesses in the encryption.
Their manual techniques (based on stacks of paper with defined patterns of holes) worked but was, of course, very slow. The Bombes sped things up and of course the electronic computers built by the British sped things up even more.
The four-rotor Navy version took much more computational power and the Navy frequently switched rotors, were much smarter about key management, and in general made life rough for Bletchly Park.
No, the code base is the same. Sun released the code base but didn't fork their own development separate from Open Office.
As others have said, Open Office is missing components (db, fonts, templates), though.
Actually the InnoBase back end does implement ACIDity. Given that I'm an outspoken pro-PostgreSQL bigot with no love of MySQL ... trust me on this!
Boy, we can tell you're paying attention. Hint: the judge is a her, not a him.
While I don't know if such efforts are successful or not, the OpenACS project I lead is directly oriented to this space (and other common-interest communities).
... much can be done by dedication, knowlege, and persistence.
I'd say that thus far such communities most naturally grow around subjects of global interest (such as photo.net), which spawned the codebase that grew to be OpenACS.
But I wouldn't give up on communities of more narrow interest. After all, in wetware space frequently membership to meetings is depressingly low. Yet
Especially since such ignorance includes missing the essential fact that corporations are not an invention of the Left, but capitalists who, on the whole, tend to be rather Conservative.
No, it's not shutting them up at all. The ruling merely says that the suit attempting to prove that Nike's ads are false and misleading can go forward.
Nike was trying to preemptively strike down the suit before the substantial issues in the case could be heard.
They're free to continue running the ads.
Let me guess - YANAL, right?
Hey, I grew up on Tektronix storage display terminals. Sure beat the hell out of a teletype or (later) DEC VT100 with their crappy 24 line display.
... "not war?" OK, I wasn't responsible for that part ...
...
And I was one of the people responsible for the old DEC OS/8 Teco. "make love"
Of course you were probably one of those lucky people running TECO on a real computer
Yes, but you don't sign a license when you pick up the latest phone book from your porch every year. There's no EULA, either.
The phone book is protected by copyright law and nothing else. MS is making you sign a license. A contract. An agreement. Maybe that last phrase is the easiest to understand - when you sign an agreement you are agreeing to the terms. That's the whole point of having an agreement/contract/license in the first place.
Which is exactly the thinking which has led to undetected buffer overruns being the most common bug leading to break-ins over the net.
Our industry as a whole hasn't outgrown its need for training wheels. The argument that professional programmers don't need safety nets like bounds checking and the like was being made twenty, twenty-five years ago and was as stupid then as it is now.
Amateurs don't need safety nets because no one uses their code and no one cares if it breaks.
Professionals do, though. People use the code professionals write. When I'm riding on an airplane I care if the software breaks.
The CIA's primary role is to examine information from a wide variety of sources and attempt to categorize and where possible act to mitigate short-term and long-term threats to the security of the United States. Given that their job is akin to predicting the future, and given that even with tremendous resources, predicting the future is exceedingly difficult, the CIA will miss a lot of things that look obvious in hindsight (Al-Quaeda was planning an attack on NYC!).So the public says "shame on you, CIA, for not spotting that obvious threat!"
When was the last time they were right?
Heh...sorry for the rant. This Microsoft "admission" is something that's so obvious to people in software development. I'm glad someone realized that was a point they could make against Microsoft.
..."
... the fact that the DOJ and MS are in agreement on the proposed remedy is something the Judge won't be able to ignore entirely.
It's important because Gates had not yielded the point in the first round of cross-examination.
Gates was reminded that an earlier witness for the States had testified that it would be possible to put together a stripped-down version (some CS prof who was given access to the source in order to prepare his testimony).
Gates said the earlier witness was wrong.
Gates was asked if the court should really be expected to believe him rather than the witness. Gates answered to the effect that "I know the Windows product
Now the attorney for the states has apparently brought up XP Embedded explictly and Gates was forced to yield.
The attorney for the states has been attacking the credibility of Gates's answers on several issues, for instance his claim that MicroSoft will withdraw Windows from the market if the states prevail.
So the point isn't the unsurprising (to software engineers) point that Windows XP could be modularized (given that it has already been modularized).
The point is that the attorney for the states has destroyed the credibility of Gates earlier testimony on this issue.
Which may well undermine the credibility of much of the rest of Gates testimony.
The attorney for the states has also been quite successful in undermining the credibility of several other witnesses for Microsoft.
The effect of diminishing the credibility of Gates and other MS witnesses might be huge when the Judge considers her ruling.
Or it might not
No, not exactly. The law is supposed to ensure that a settlement strips the offender of the fruits of its illegal behavior. Doing so is bound to help their competitors, albeit indirectly.
Given that Gates testified one day earlier, that it was impossible, and made similar claims in his 163 page written testimony, it is an important issue.
But of course from reading your response we can tell that you haven't followed Gates testimony but are just hand-waving, can't we?
Well, you're right about falling in love with mass transit when travelling abroad, but other than Japan, who has gone the monorail route?
... anything's better than driving a car in Seattle. The Sounder's a good idea, pity your regional governments are far behind in schedule and embarrassingly over budget (perhaps a true regional government like our Metro down in Portland would help?) You've got a brand-new commuter rail system that has standing room only boarding during morning and evening rush hours and a third set of trains that are late. Track projects that are late. Etc.
Steel-on-steel (dual rail) is more efficient and doesn't require any additional pylon space on the ground if it is elevated. Seattle's existing monorail cars are just circa-1960s subway cars (it was built in the 60s, do you expect circa-2000 subway cars?)
Still
This, actually, is probably one of the appeals of monorail. New infrastructure needs to be built, which means you can't be held hostage as some might argue BNSF does to the Sounder project.
Bombardier has built cars for Portland transit, though I don't remember if they're light rail or busses or trolleys. We've got too many transit systems here, can't remember who built what :)
Meanwhile, Portland Oregon, to the south, with our "repressive" intensive city planning, urban boundary, land-use planning measures and all that, manages to build light-rail segment after segment more or less on budget, more or less on time, and with ridership above estimates.
Clearly we're a bunch of gawddamned Godless commies compared to the good, honest, business-uber-alles people of Seattle, aren't we?
"We want them to think it's like a ride at Disneyland," said Bob Broadbent, who leads the project, "not public transportation."
DisneyVegas (or is it VegasWorld?) can afford mass transit of this type, it certainly doesn't fit the real world any more than its extravagent use of water in a desert that gets less than 10" a year (the definition of a desert!) could be supported without its financial underpinnings as a destination resort.
Monorails are innefficient which is one of the main reasons why they've not been adopted. As this poster says, they have tires and tires on concrete, whether they grip the road or grip a concrete i-beam, are inherently less efficient and require more frequent replacement than good old steel-on-steel rail.
Elevating saves money, but steel-on-steel rail can be elevated, too.
So ... the motivation here is not only to reduce congestion but to do so via 1960s technology which, not having been adopted mainstream for very good reasons, is still exotic and therefore fitting for a tourist destination.
I'm not knocking it ... it seems ideal for Las Vegas (just as buses coming down from NYC and urban NJ seem ideal technology for Atlantic City).
But if anyone thinks this portends a change in thinking as to the future of mass transit ... better get Disney or the mob involved before adopting monorail as your savior from congestion!
I do most of my software development on my Dell Laptop these days, typically running Linux, Oracle or Postgres (depending on project or client) and AOLserver if I'm doing web/db stuff.
I love the portability. I've been working out of my house for about fifteen years, and my current laptop is the first machine I've owned that truly lets me work where I want to work. When in town, that typically means local coffee shops, where I've met several other people who do the same thing.
I owned the first portable Unix system out there, an old Sony News with a monochrome display, 240MB SCSI hard drive, 24 MB RAM, MIPS 3000 CPU, and built in ethernet. Not bad for the late 1980s. It weighed a ton (20 lbs? something like that) but fit under an airline seat.
That introduced me to the notion that portable computing was reaching the point where professional software engineers could consider cutting loose from traditional work environments.
Today's laptops are amazingly good. Oracle on a laptop? I would've laughed ten years ago.
I bought my Dell refurbished, saving about 30% while still getting the same 3 yr warranty they offer for new machines. If you can find a refurbished machine that fits your needs you can save a few bucks this way.
Mine will be three years old this summer, and it's starting to show slight signs of flakiness.
I'm not particularly hard on it but I do use it for several hours nearly every day, lug it around in my bookbag along with a bunch of other junk, sling it under the seat on airplanes, in the trunk of the car on road trips, etc.
I almost never use the big padded carrying case I bought with it. The plastic's fairly well marked up from traveling snuggled next to camera bodies and the like, so it is subjected to a certain amount of wear and tear.
But it continues to work, day in and day out. Can't ask for more!
Mine has a 14.1" screen. A friend has a more recent Inspiron with a 15" screen and it's noticably more bulky and heavier than my Latitude. Not sure I'd trade the screen space for the additional bulk, though obviously no screen can be too big.
In general you can't deduct for your time ...
For reasons that make sense. If I forgo $100 in income, I'm not paying tax on that income. If you could deduct the $100 as a charitable deduction you'd have a double tax savings (once for the deduction, once the tax you didn't pay on the income you didn't accept).
I tried reading this with Mozilla 1.0 RC1 and ... well, I'm posting this with Konqueror, so you can guess what happened.
At least we know that a Mozilla-crashing bug triggered by Slashdot is going to get noticed!
After spending much of yesterday removing the Nimda virus from a friend's computer, I have to laugh at claims that Window's is easy for the neophyte to use while Linux isn't.
My friend went to MIT on a full scholarship (civil engineering) and to Tufts on a tuition scholarship (environmental engineering). While she has no sysadmin skills she's neither neophtye nor stupid.
Yet without my help I doubt she would've been able to defeat Nimda in any reasonable amount of time.
As soon as ESRi releases ArcGIS for Linux (hopefully later this year) she's switching. It will be easier than learning to dodge, avoid, and when necessary remove all the friggin' viruses, worms, and other nasties that keep cropping up in the Windows world. Her GIS tools are the only thing keeping her on Windows. Other than that she only needs a web browser, e-mail client, and Open Office, no problem.
This explains why the EPA uses Word Perfect rather than MS Word?
The feds are hardly a microsoft-only shop, though obviously they license enormous amounts of Microsoft software.
Yeah, I like some of their reasoning. If you run Windows 2000 users only need one username/password. If you deploy on Linux users need two, one for Windows, one for Linux ...
... what if we're only using Linux servers and have no Win2K servers at all? Hmmmm....
But wait