What are you crazy? Microsoft patents wiping your butt with two-ply. Of course it's patented. The way patents work though we won't see which patents for ten years or more - if ever.
That's all we need to know to know that its purpose is to support Microft's desire to control everything on Earth.
Microsoft used procedures to good effect to disable even ISO - the arbiter of procedure controls - in their OOXML battle. There comes a time when you have to accept you're dealing with the devil - and he cheats and lies. He is in fact the father of lies, but he can be persuasive.
Your "Microsoft invented" paragraph I'm just going to point out that it's both untrue and indicative of a desire to claim genesis of the inventions of others, or perhaps taint the common recollection. The proof is left as an exercise.
Google paid $133M for ON2 and then open sourced their only product and gave it away for free to everyone in the world - not just the compiled proprietary CODEC: the source code, the patents and everything. Those bastards! How DARE they give us a free video format that anybody can implement without asking permission, with examples even.
Don't they know there are incumbent video CODEC providers who use their ownership of many patents to prevent free platforms that prevent display of compressed video to protect us from platforms they don't control? Enabling free video was a thoughtless destruction of many avenues of market control. That was bad, and Google should feel bad.
Of course we aren't obligated to use Google's services unless they are better. We are obligated to use software that embraces one standard or another. So by embracing open standards anybody can use Google is avoiding the standard "capture the customer" logic and pursuing a "promote progress and always excel" strategy that expresses confidence in their ability to do services better than anybody while improving standards to deliver new levels of progress in UI.
Selecting the best software solution for line of business applications requires some foresight. If the software selection involves chewing your leg off to escape its trap prior to your retirement date, you don't want it as it will impede your quiet contemplation of life's purpose while killing salmonids in your declining years. IE6 and its.NET server complements turned into such a trap and ruined many a career - and is still doing so.
Youth imagine themselves wiser than their elders having fresh insight, but the wisest youth will look to the indigent elder and ask how he came to be in that condition. We are having a generational change in IT now, and it's time for the old guard to pass on the tribal knowledge.
One of the most essential things we need to teach youths is not to build your castle on sand. Place your faith in no man. Do not ever build in dependency on a single source, like a business-essential application that requires a client or server available from only one vendor. That makes your future hostage to that vendor and experience will show that given that level of influence over you, the vendor will abuse it for all they can against your better interest - and that can go quite further than you ever imagined. Don't chose to be a hostage.
Most especially having chewed your leg off to get out of the trap don't go back to the same vendor for the new, improved and more user friendly Trap V.2.01. If you do that you're only going to lose another leg. That would make fishing hard in your declining years.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. - Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Microsoft wields standards like an axe to lay low their foes. They are the natural enemy of interoperability - a company that built its business on being incompatible with everything they want to dominate, one corner at a time. Here, for example, is them talking about leveraging standards to dominate Novell, from the documents disclosed in Comes v. Microsoft
Microsoft got their ExFAT format accepted as a standard volume format for SD and its derivatives, and now use it to extort broad patent portfolio licensing from Android manufacturers because if it supports SDHC or uSDHC with a reasonable media size, the Android device must support ExFAT or it won't be compatible with cameras and other devices that use it. That's a clever strategy for Microsoft, but not a smart one for people who made the format standard because it ultimately makes the standard a dead end.
People who just want to move pictures from the camera to the tablet on the card must pay more now for the tablet, or buy the Microsoft supported tablet and we know what those are like. Ultimately it's destructive to the standard and costly to consumers as uSDHC BOM costs $0.07 to implement and the patent portfolio license demanded is more like $15-25 - we can't even be sure exactly what the price is as they won't even negotiate a license except under NDA. Naturally this leads to innovative devices like the Nexus 7 omitting external storage support entirely and holds back progress in the field. It encourages wifi-attached cameras to avoid the problem. The standard becomes a trap that allows one participant in the market to control its direction. Obviously this is not the purpose of standards.
Post the OOXML debacle this is well understood, and nobody who wants their standard taken seriously would align with Microsoft. The ISO may take a decade to repair the damage from that one where resources deployed to put over the standard involved not just dirty dealing, but deploying such heavy hitters as heads of state.
Microsoft is no longer the 800lb gorilla of IT, casting the long shadow they once did. Even Apple swings more weight than them now. Android phones moved more units and profits than their Windows PC OEMs did last quarter. They don't get to make the rules any more. For the rest of us that's a good thing because they really suck at it. It's like playing Calvinball with Calvin, or any game with a six-year-old: rule 1 is they always get to win.
/Why yes, I did hide this comment down low in the thread on purpose.
Each of those activations represents a unique device. So they are all sales, because TANSTAAFL. Also, non-cellular devices aren't counted at all and there are quite a few of those. The number is seriously undercounted.
Everybody knows that Microsoft makes Windows incompatible with their competitors products. "Windows isn't done till Lotus won't run." To continue to ship Windows is to pay them to do this as they gradually make your products worse and steal your customers. The OEMs are dumb, but they aren't THAT dumb.
I advise printing it out and posting it in the hall in printed form, annotated with contributors. Paper the walls with it. You would be surprised how much more efficient that makes a coder even if it's not ever read.
Also, for debugging sometimes you have to get down on the floor with 50 pages of fanfold and work it out. Decorum be damned. A PC only has so much vertical resolution and sometimes you need more than to peek at the code through a sliding window.
My experience includes fellow humans who for whatever reason believe in things that are provably untrue. Spies in their underwear, CIA receivers in their fillings, a potential balanced federal budget, and so on. Subjectively these folk are in my experience and I am confident they believe these things absolutely through whatever defect in their mind manifests these visions as concrete unambiguous subjective proof as much as I disbelieve them through what I perceive to be absolute unambiguous subjective proof. I therefore cannot trust my own mind, as I have no objective measure to know if I am not equally defective. All objective proofs I might instantiate are filtered through this potentially fallible mind of mine and might be imagined, so they can't be trusted either even first-hand, let alone second hand. For all I know I'm making all of this up after the fact, none of them or even you/.ers actually exist and so on. Maybe this is a test.
I am left with nothing but to act as if I am sane without knowing whether I actually am within the context of what I believe sanity is, to be successful in my social context - to deal with the folk I come across as kindly as I can in the hope they might reciprocate and leave me with a mutually pleasant subjective experience; to leave them to their phantoms and demand they leave me to mine as much as possible - which thus far is working out. Maybe the Dalai Lama is right, and kindness is the path to wisdom. Or maybe he's just a creation of my psyche as much as you are.
I'm fairly acclimated to this doubt. Given a couple pages of LZW proofs from the ACM Communications and an article on packet streaming I can implement the.GIF protocol in any of the 40+ programming languages I know. Given 40 thermocouples in a box I can develop a sensor input to fan speed algorithm to minimize the acoustic output for any level of processor and other system thermal output. I can design a server, storage and networking architecture to serve 40,000 users with email and VDI for least cost. My subjective experience is that the external responses to these efforts are generally positive. But I can't be sure this isn't just some sort of mental masturbation and I'm actually locked in a ward somewhere, and these things are figments of my imagination. Nor can you.
A lot of the best results come from this sort of unaccountable patronage. A lot is wasted also, it is true. But the things found this way that can't be found any other way - they're pretty irreplaceable.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has figured out that people read their job postings to forecast their efforts and it's part of their PR efforts now.
What are you crazy? Microsoft patents wiping your butt with two-ply. Of course it's patented. The way patents work though we won't see which patents for ten years or more - if ever.
That's all we need to know to know that its purpose is to support Microft's desire to control everything on Earth.
Microsoft used procedures to good effect to disable even ISO - the arbiter of procedure controls - in their OOXML battle. There comes a time when you have to accept you're dealing with the devil - and he cheats and lies. He is in fact the father of lies, but he can be persuasive.
Your "Microsoft invented" paragraph I'm just going to point out that it's both untrue and indicative of a desire to claim genesis of the inventions of others, or perhaps taint the common recollection. The proof is left as an exercise.
Google paid $133M for ON2 and then open sourced their only product and gave it away for free to everyone in the world - not just the compiled proprietary CODEC: the source code, the patents and everything. Those bastards! How DARE they give us a free video format that anybody can implement without asking permission, with examples even.
Don't they know there are incumbent video CODEC providers who use their ownership of many patents to prevent free platforms that prevent display of compressed video to protect us from platforms they don't control? Enabling free video was a thoughtless destruction of many avenues of market control. That was bad, and Google should feel bad.
/sarcasm
Of course we aren't obligated to use Google's services unless they are better. We are obligated to use software that embraces one standard or another. So by embracing open standards anybody can use Google is avoiding the standard "capture the customer" logic and pursuing a "promote progress and always excel" strategy that expresses confidence in their ability to do services better than anybody while improving standards to deliver new levels of progress in UI.
I'm OK with that. That works for me.
Parent was the most informative comment in this whole discussion.
Microsoft has inserted some operatives into W3schools, and they're causing this problem. They will be rooted out.
Selecting the best software solution for line of business applications requires some foresight. If the software selection involves chewing your leg off to escape its trap prior to your retirement date, you don't want it as it will impede your quiet contemplation of life's purpose while killing salmonids in your declining years. IE6 and its .NET server complements turned into such a trap and ruined many a career - and is still doing so.
Youth imagine themselves wiser than their elders having fresh insight, but the wisest youth will look to the indigent elder and ask how he came to be in that condition. We are having a generational change in IT now, and it's time for the old guard to pass on the tribal knowledge.
One of the most essential things we need to teach youths is not to build your castle on sand. Place your faith in no man. Do not ever build in dependency on a single source, like a business-essential application that requires a client or server available from only one vendor. That makes your future hostage to that vendor and experience will show that given that level of influence over you, the vendor will abuse it for all they can against your better interest - and that can go quite further than you ever imagined. Don't chose to be a hostage.
Most especially having chewed your leg off to get out of the trap don't go back to the same vendor for the new, improved and more user friendly Trap V.2.01. If you do that you're only going to lose another leg. That would make fishing hard in your declining years.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. - Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Microsoft wields standards like an axe to lay low their foes. They are the natural enemy of interoperability - a company that built its business on being incompatible with everything they want to dominate, one corner at a time. Here, for example, is them talking about leveraging standards to dominate Novell, from the documents disclosed in Comes v. Microsoft
Microsoft got their ExFAT format accepted as a standard volume format for SD and its derivatives, and now use it to extort broad patent portfolio licensing from Android manufacturers because if it supports SDHC or uSDHC with a reasonable media size, the Android device must support ExFAT or it won't be compatible with cameras and other devices that use it. That's a clever strategy for Microsoft, but not a smart one for people who made the format standard because it ultimately makes the standard a dead end.
People who just want to move pictures from the camera to the tablet on the card must pay more now for the tablet, or buy the Microsoft supported tablet and we know what those are like. Ultimately it's destructive to the standard and costly to consumers as uSDHC BOM costs $0.07 to implement and the patent portfolio license demanded is more like $15-25 - we can't even be sure exactly what the price is as they won't even negotiate a license except under NDA. Naturally this leads to innovative devices like the Nexus 7 omitting external storage support entirely and holds back progress in the field. It encourages wifi-attached cameras to avoid the problem. The standard becomes a trap that allows one participant in the market to control its direction. Obviously this is not the purpose of standards.
Post the OOXML debacle this is well understood, and nobody who wants their standard taken seriously would align with Microsoft. The ISO may take a decade to repair the damage from that one where resources deployed to put over the standard involved not just dirty dealing, but deploying such heavy hitters as heads of state.
Microsoft is no longer the 800lb gorilla of IT, casting the long shadow they once did. Even Apple swings more weight than them now. Android phones moved more units and profits than their Windows PC OEMs did last quarter. They don't get to make the rules any more. For the rest of us that's a good thing because they really suck at it. It's like playing Calvinball with Calvin, or any game with a six-year-old: rule 1 is they always get to win.
/Why yes, I did hide this comment down low in the thread on purpose.
I was going to go with "coprolitic" but "fecesious" works. Well said.
Maybe we could make glass with it. The color is quite lovely. Plates?
It is not responsible to operate a reactor if you don't have a solid plan for dealing with the waste.
It won't take millions of connections at 100x the average to bring that average up.
Maybe the Google Fiber rollout will go faster than anticipated. That's an uncapped, unmetered gigabit in and out for $70/mo.
We need some sort of vpn exchange where like-minded geeks can exchange local Internet access. And a box to make it easy.
I don't know why this would surprise you. Linux is the most hardware compatible OS ever.
Each of those activations represents a unique device. So they are all sales, because TANSTAAFL. Also, non-cellular devices aren't counted at all and there are quite a few of those. The number is seriously undercounted.
Android activations are up over a million a day now, and it's not Christmas yet.
If Asus, Dell, HP and Acer all dropped desktop PC sales their margins would go up. If Lenovo did they might actually turn a profit.
Everybody knows that Microsoft makes Windows incompatible with their competitors products. "Windows isn't done till Lotus won't run." To continue to ship Windows is to pay them to do this as they gradually make your products worse and steal your customers. The OEMs are dumb, but they aren't THAT dumb.
I'm sure that the filing cabinet just to the left is marked "Sendo", and the one to the right is marked "HP".
I advise printing it out and posting it in the hall in printed form, annotated with contributors. Paper the walls with it. You would be surprised how much more efficient that makes a coder even if it's not ever read.
Also, for debugging sometimes you have to get down on the floor with 50 pages of fanfold and work it out. Decorum be damned. A PC only has so much vertical resolution and sometimes you need more than to peek at the code through a sliding window.
My experience includes fellow humans who for whatever reason believe in things that are provably untrue. Spies in their underwear, CIA receivers in their fillings, a potential balanced federal budget, and so on. Subjectively these folk are in my experience and I am confident they believe these things absolutely through whatever defect in their mind manifests these visions as concrete unambiguous subjective proof as much as I disbelieve them through what I perceive to be absolute unambiguous subjective proof. I therefore cannot trust my own mind, as I have no objective measure to know if I am not equally defective. All objective proofs I might instantiate are filtered through this potentially fallible mind of mine and might be imagined, so they can't be trusted either even first-hand, let alone second hand. For all I know I'm making all of this up after the fact, none of them or even you /.ers actually exist and so on. Maybe this is a test.
I am left with nothing but to act as if I am sane without knowing whether I actually am within the context of what I believe sanity is, to be successful in my social context - to deal with the folk I come across as kindly as I can in the hope they might reciprocate and leave me with a mutually pleasant subjective experience; to leave them to their phantoms and demand they leave me to mine as much as possible - which thus far is working out. Maybe the Dalai Lama is right, and kindness is the path to wisdom. Or maybe he's just a creation of my psyche as much as you are.
I'm fairly acclimated to this doubt. Given a couple pages of LZW proofs from the ACM Communications and an article on packet streaming I can implement the .GIF protocol in any of the 40+ programming languages I know. Given 40 thermocouples in a box I can develop a sensor input to fan speed algorithm to minimize the acoustic output for any level of processor and other system thermal output. I can design a server, storage and networking architecture to serve 40,000 users with email and VDI for least cost. My subjective experience is that the external responses to these efforts are generally positive. But I can't be sure this isn't just some sort of mental masturbation and I'm actually locked in a ward somewhere, and these things are figments of my imagination. Nor can you.
Social Security is already unsustainable. It didn't have to be, but it is.
A lot of the best results come from this sort of unaccountable patronage. A lot is wasted also, it is true. But the things found this way that can't be found any other way - they're pretty irreplaceable.