There is one piece of data I'm extremely curious about. I know ads are not actually worth that much, and from personal experience, I know that I don't misspell too many URLs each day (since I mostly select them from either my bookmark list, Google, or by following links within existing sites).
So how much money do the ISP's make from this behavior? Is it thousands of dollars each day? Or is the internet being broken for just a handful of dollars?
Do I want people seeing code I wrote that long ago? Well, not too long ago I found the complete source code for fMSX Amiga, which occupied my time for about 6 years, starting around 1994 - so that's 14 years ago now.
Browsing through that code, I find it to be far more readable, and far more elegant than anything I have done since (quite surprising really, since this is a mixture of C, C++, and 68K assembly). It helps that it is a relatively small project (only 44K lines in the final version), and that I was doing it for myself, so I could spend the time to make it right. Everything since then was for work (and thus under a deadline), and involved much larger bodies of code.
So would I mind people seeing it today? Hell no, I'm proud of my work.
There is of course the separate question of seeing private emails from that time published. That is something I wouldn't appreciate, and unfortunately something that seems to have happened here.
You got it all wrong. You do it by charging a HIGHER price for a comparable Linux / OpenOffice based package.
Pricing it higher will create the impression that this is a more worthwhile package (and vice versa: a lower-priced package will be less worthwhile). And it creates income that can be used to further build up the open source industry.
The democrats clearly have the power to overcome this minor problem: simply spend even more and tax even less. In fact, why tax _at all_ for the next four years? Just spend whatever you need, stop any service that you can do with for a few years, and let the republicans fix it.
(Side note: that's one of the better "Dummies" books ever printed). I'm just trying to imagine the issues that you must have if you are buying shelves full of those "...for dummies" books...;-)
I don't know about the old days, but today the documentation of PostgreSQL is _THE VERY BEST_ I have ever seen on an Open Source project, and should be the standard that other projects aspire to. In fact, I can only name a handful of closed source projects that reach that same level of quality and comprehensiveness.
As for tools, of course I do not know what you need, but pgAdmin 3 is absolutely excellent for inspecting and modifying your database structure and doing some adhoc queries. Other things, like reporting tools, and things like Powerbuilder, aren't really there as far as I can tell. And I have no experience with PostgreSQL clustering so I cannot tell you how good it is.
Yes, slavery is and was wrong, but after a certain point we need to let it go. So you do not believe that the descendants of the slaves should make reparations for all the extra undue wealth, comfort and opportunities their new homeland has brought them?
2010: "it's pretty clear that the occupation of Iraq wouldn't have ended as quickly as it did if it were not for al queada's terrorist tactics. Because of that, al quaeda's tactics were justified."
...what I'd like to know is how the 380 vs 787 delays stack up against each other. You can stack up about two dreamliners inside the A380 and still have some spare room for passengers.
Your assertion that there is no American empire is laughable. The mechanisms of government may be different, but they still exist, and the US uses them to wield immense influence in a great many countries.
Its fall would therefore mean a falling from prominence, a decrease in influence over other parts of the world. This is already happening today: for example, the EU is deploying initiatives to decrease American influence. One high-profile one is Galileo, but it also includes such things as the ability to manufacture electronics without having to get approval in Washington (which is required for many mil-spec electronics).
And the dollar doesn't buy as much as it used to, does it? That's also waning influence. When the OPEC nations shift to the euro, and don't think it won't happen, it will be a blow to the dollar that it won't recover from. In fact the *primary* reason to invade Iraq, as far as I can tell, was because they were trading oil in euro's, and that was too dangerous to allow.
What happens afterwards on american soil is almost irrelevant. Italy did not disappear from the map after Rome fell, nor was the city itself abandoned. It just didn't matter anymore. That's the fate coming to the US: it will still be there, but it will be like Canada - no doubt a pleasant place to visit, but largely irrelevant on the global scale.
That is not necessarily a bad thing for americans, though: you can grow your own food, and you have your own resources and energy, so you have everything you need to live comfortably. And please don't take this as gloating. Indeed, the problems this causes elsewhere (Taiwan, for example) will probably be far greater than in the US.
On the subject of american government: some would say that your dictator is already in place (and he is part of the corporatocracy, which by the way is just another term for fascism), that the cataclysmic event you speak of has already occurred (9/11), and that the desires of your citizens have been shown to be irrelevant in the face of corporate lobbying. Your vote, then, has little or meaning - you go through the motions, and no doubt it makes you feel happy, but the only thing you are allowed to decide is the color of the carpets in the whitehouse, not any of its policies. Like security at the airport, it is all a big show.
Let's not confuse the issue: Microsoft has been fined, and now has a criminal record.
If you, as an individual, do something silly that causes you to get a criminal record, you are ineligible for a great many jobs for the rest of your life. In fact, if you have a criminal record outside the US, you will not be allowed entry into the US at all anymore.
Your argument essentially boils down to, "they had a pretty good run so far so I'm assuming they are invincible".
Same how the Roman empire was invincible, really. And the British empire. And let's not even get started on the American empire, which is crumbling before our very eyes.
Where is IBM? Where is Word Perfect? Both ruled supreme in their days, but those days are long gone. And just like IBM, Microsoft will still be around - but not as the powerhouse it once was. It will just be another big player instead.
One day soon the stockholders will ask why Microsoft is sinking so much money into XBox 360 or any of those other loss-making projects that Microsoft enjoys so much. And once they pull the plug on such projects, they will start to wonder if profits wouldn't be higher if Office were in a separate company, not fettered to any particular operating system.
Windows will survive that, as will Microsoft. But it will gradually become a niche product, one of many choices available for the operating system. Hardware will be controlled more and more through hypervisors. Applications will more and more be in virtualized environments of their own (beit virtual machines like Java or.NET, or in interpreted environments like browsers).
And one day, someone will ask "what operating system are you running that on?", and despite being a card-carrying geek with a 4-digit slashdot ID, you will be forced to admit "Uhm, I'm not actually sure." Because it won't matter anymore.
I was sort-of making a joke, but underlying that was a serious point: the usual argument for the patent system, which is "some poor guy with a great idea", is an illusion that is planted firmly in our heads by wealthy people who actually _own_ ideas (as opposed to us poor sods who _have_ ideas but lack the money to protect them).
I made fun of you by pointing out that those people do not actually exist. And sure, I didn't really believe that you might be waiting with your idea for a warp engine that also produces free energy until patent protection is actually 30 years instead of 20, but neither is anyone else.
Does innovation need protection? That depends first and foremost on the cost of that innovation. If research budgets of billions are required to do any innovation at all (think medicine, for example), some sort of patent protection is probably nice (although, imagine that your company just spent 10 years and 5 billion euro's creating a new drug, only to see a competitor patent it hours before you do...)
But if innovation is conveniently achieved by some guy typing at his computer during the weekend, there is far less need for long-lasting, extremely expensive monopolies to be put in place just so noone else will waste a weekend "innovating". I dare say that just about all software patents fall in this category.
And if you do have that one bright idea, and manage to get a patent, how will you be able to protect it in a world filled with IBM's and Microsofts? If you make a product out of it you will be infringing two dozen of their patents, and be made to pay dearly for the privilege of manufacturing your own idea. Or you can be a patent troll, except that you cannot afford to hire good enough lawyers to take on the corporate might of whoever your target is. Either way, you are screwed.
Are you innovating today? How many patents do you have?
If the answers are "not at all", and "zero", I'll take that as proof that the patent system does not work. You could, after all, be out there innovating something and instead you are posting to Slashdot...
Since anyone using those patents is now guilty of violation, there is a risk that Alcatel will go after Windows users next. Does *your* organisation have a risk mitigation plan for when the lawsuits start flying? Or will you simply close your eyes and hope that Microsofts "indemnification" is worth more than the pixels it is printed on?
How does that indemnification work anyway? As far as I can tell, any legal proceedings would be between Alcatel and targeted patent violators - i.e. Microsoft has no standing in such cases. Do they offer to pay for any damages and cost incurred? In that case I guess the risk is acceptable after all...
And how does that help? Any dataset that fits in memory can be sorted almost instantaneous using a single core. And datasets that do not fit in memory don't benefit from having more cores since they are IO-bound anyway.
I'm not a M$ fanboi either but here's some logic that might help explain it: XP is getting too well-known. Microsoft needs to update (meaning 'change', not 'improve') its technology regularly, or all those Microsoft Certified Dimwits will have time to think about alternatives. Microsoft needs to keep them spending all their time on Microsoft "technologies" - this both keeps them busy, and forces them to defend their earlier investments, thus making it more likely they will come back for another helping later.
If that train stops, all those people may have a look at Linux... And like it, or find some niche where it works better than Windows in their organisation, and introduce a few small servers... And then a few more... And OpenOffice... And suddenly entire organisations may be dropping their entire Microsoft investment.
Microsoft also needs people (in particular, decision makers) to think of them as the top in technology. If you don't introduce new technology those people will start to wonder about alternatives as well. "Will I buy this new Linux thing I have been hearing about so much, or that 8-year old Microsoft OS that is always in the news with reports about security holes? Firefox sure works nice..."
Microsoft needs to keep running, and changing things, because the moment they don't, they will be dead.
Arguably that moment has already come, and what we are seeing right now is just some residual momentum in the carcass...
Slashdot Mirror
There is one piece of data I'm extremely curious about. I know ads are not actually worth that much, and from personal experience, I know that I don't misspell too many URLs each day (since I mostly select them from either my bookmark list, Google, or by following links within existing sites).
So how much money do the ISP's make from this behavior? Is it thousands of dollars each day? Or is the internet being broken for just a handful of dollars?
Do I want people seeing code I wrote that long ago? Well, not too long ago I found the complete source code for fMSX Amiga, which occupied my time for about 6 years, starting around 1994 - so that's 14 years ago now.
Browsing through that code, I find it to be far more readable, and far more elegant than anything I have done since (quite surprising really, since this is a mixture of C, C++, and 68K assembly). It helps that it is a relatively small project (only 44K lines in the final version), and that I was doing it for myself, so I could spend the time to make it right. Everything since then was for work (and thus under a deadline), and involved much larger bodies of code.
So would I mind people seeing it today? Hell no, I'm proud of my work.
There is of course the separate question of seeing private emails from that time published. That is something I wouldn't appreciate, and unfortunately something that seems to have happened here.
You got it all wrong. You do it by charging a HIGHER price for a comparable Linux / OpenOffice based package.
Pricing it higher will create the impression that this is a more worthwhile package (and vice versa: a lower-priced package will be less worthwhile). And it creates income that can be used to further build up the open source industry.
The lifecycle of cats is also determined by quantum mechanics.
The democrats clearly have the power to overcome this minor problem: simply spend even more and tax even less. In fact, why tax _at all_ for the next four years? Just spend whatever you need, stop any service that you can do with for a few years, and let the republicans fix it.
I don't know about the old days, but today the documentation of PostgreSQL is _THE VERY BEST_ I have ever seen on an Open Source project, and should be the standard that other projects aspire to. In fact, I can only name a handful of closed source projects that reach that same level of quality and comprehensiveness.
As for tools, of course I do not know what you need, but pgAdmin 3 is absolutely excellent for inspecting and modifying your database structure and doing some adhoc queries. Other things, like reporting tools, and things like Powerbuilder, aren't really there as far as I can tell. And I have no experience with PostgreSQL clustering so I cannot tell you how good it is.
I realize I was being exceedingly subtle, but read again what I wrote ;-)
2010: "it's pretty clear that the occupation of Iraq wouldn't have ended as quickly as it did if it were not for al queada's terrorist tactics. Because of that, al quaeda's tactics were justified."
...what I'd like to know is how the 380 vs 787 delays stack up against each other. You can stack up about two dreamliners inside the A380 and still have some spare room for passengers.Your assertion that there is no American empire is laughable. The mechanisms of government may be different, but they still exist, and the US uses them to wield immense influence in a great many countries.
Its fall would therefore mean a falling from prominence, a decrease in influence over other parts of the world. This is already happening today: for example, the EU is deploying initiatives to decrease American influence. One high-profile one is Galileo, but it also includes such things as the ability to manufacture electronics without having to get approval in Washington (which is required for many mil-spec electronics).
And the dollar doesn't buy as much as it used to, does it? That's also waning influence. When the OPEC nations shift to the euro, and don't think it won't happen, it will be a blow to the dollar that it won't recover from. In fact the *primary* reason to invade Iraq, as far as I can tell, was because they were trading oil in euro's, and that was too dangerous to allow.
What happens afterwards on american soil is almost irrelevant. Italy did not disappear from the map after Rome fell, nor was the city itself abandoned. It just didn't matter anymore. That's the fate coming to the US: it will still be there, but it will be like Canada - no doubt a pleasant place to visit, but largely irrelevant on the global scale.
That is not necessarily a bad thing for americans, though: you can grow your own food, and you have your own resources and energy, so you have everything you need to live comfortably. And please don't take this as gloating. Indeed, the problems this causes elsewhere (Taiwan, for example) will probably be far greater than in the US.
On the subject of american government: some would say that your dictator is already in place (and he is part of the corporatocracy, which by the way is just another term for fascism), that the cataclysmic event you speak of has already occurred (9/11), and that the desires of your citizens have been shown to be irrelevant in the face of corporate lobbying. Your vote, then, has little or meaning - you go through the motions, and no doubt it makes you feel happy, but the only thing you are allowed to decide is the color of the carpets in the whitehouse, not any of its policies. Like security at the airport, it is all a big show.
Let's not confuse the issue: Microsoft has been fined, and now has a criminal record.
If you, as an individual, do something silly that causes you to get a criminal record, you are ineligible for a great many jobs for the rest of your life. In fact, if you have a criminal record outside the US, you will not be allowed entry into the US at all anymore.
So why is it different for corporations?
Your argument essentially boils down to, "they had a pretty good run so far so I'm assuming they are invincible".
.NET, or in interpreted environments like browsers).
Same how the Roman empire was invincible, really. And the British empire. And let's not even get started on the American empire, which is crumbling before our very eyes.
Where is IBM? Where is Word Perfect? Both ruled supreme in their days, but those days are long gone. And just like IBM, Microsoft will still be around - but not as the powerhouse it once was. It will just be another big player instead.
One day soon the stockholders will ask why Microsoft is sinking so much money into XBox 360 or any of those other loss-making projects that Microsoft enjoys so much. And once they pull the plug on such projects, they will start to wonder if profits wouldn't be higher if Office were in a separate company, not fettered to any particular operating system.
Windows will survive that, as will Microsoft. But it will gradually become a niche product, one of many choices available for the operating system. Hardware will be controlled more and more through hypervisors. Applications will more and more be in virtualized environments of their own (beit virtual machines like Java or
And one day, someone will ask "what operating system are you running that on?", and despite being a card-carrying geek with a 4-digit slashdot ID, you will be forced to admit "Uhm, I'm not actually sure." Because it won't matter anymore.
If you have a criminal record it lasts for life. Why is it only five years for corporations?
I believe the mafia thinks differently.
Disconnect the damn control network already. It will be much harder to break into when it is not physically connected to the internet.
Ok, here's some answers to get you going:
1. Power lines break during storms because the wind cracks the towers, causing them to fall over.
2. Once broken, the electricity company will cut the power. It will then (but not before!) be safe to steal the lines.
3. If you are using laptops as footwear, you are doing it wrong...
That counts as backup... Noone says it *has* to be tape you know.
I was sort-of making a joke, but underlying that was a serious point: the usual argument for the patent system, which is "some poor guy with a great idea", is an illusion that is planted firmly in our heads by wealthy people who actually _own_ ideas (as opposed to us poor sods who _have_ ideas but lack the money to protect them).
I made fun of you by pointing out that those people do not actually exist. And sure, I didn't really believe that you might be waiting with your idea for a warp engine that also produces free energy until patent protection is actually 30 years instead of 20, but neither is anyone else.
Does innovation need protection? That depends first and foremost on the cost of that innovation. If research budgets of billions are required to do any innovation at all (think medicine, for example), some sort of patent protection is probably nice (although, imagine that your company just spent 10 years and 5 billion euro's creating a new drug, only to see a competitor patent it hours before you do...)
But if innovation is conveniently achieved by some guy typing at his computer during the weekend, there is far less need for long-lasting, extremely expensive monopolies to be put in place just so noone else will waste a weekend "innovating". I dare say that just about all software patents fall in this category.
And if you do have that one bright idea, and manage to get a patent, how will you be able to protect it in a world filled with IBM's and Microsofts? If you make a product out of it you will be infringing two dozen of their patents, and be made to pay dearly for the privilege of manufacturing your own idea. Or you can be a patent troll, except that you cannot afford to hire good enough lawyers to take on the corporate might of whoever your target is. Either way, you are screwed.
Are you innovating today? How many patents do you have?
If the answers are "not at all", and "zero", I'll take that as proof that the patent system does not work. You could, after all, be out there innovating something and instead you are posting to Slashdot...
Since anyone using those patents is now guilty of violation, there is a risk that Alcatel will go after Windows users next. Does *your* organisation have a risk mitigation plan for when the lawsuits start flying? Or will you simply close your eyes and hope that Microsofts "indemnification" is worth more than the pixels it is printed on?
How does that indemnification work anyway? As far as I can tell, any legal proceedings would be between Alcatel and targeted patent violators - i.e. Microsoft has no standing in such cases. Do they offer to pay for any damages and cost incurred? In that case I guess the risk is acceptable after all...
And how does that help? Any dataset that fits in memory can be sorted almost instantaneous using a single core. And datasets that do not fit in memory don't benefit from having more cores since they are IO-bound anyway.
I'm not a M$ fanboi either but here's some logic that might help explain it: XP is getting too well-known. Microsoft needs to update (meaning 'change', not 'improve') its technology regularly, or all those Microsoft Certified Dimwits will have time to think about alternatives. Microsoft needs to keep them spending all their time on Microsoft "technologies" - this both keeps them busy, and forces them to defend their earlier investments, thus making it more likely they will come back for another helping later.
If that train stops, all those people may have a look at Linux... And like it, or find some niche where it works better than Windows in their organisation, and introduce a few small servers... And then a few more... And OpenOffice... And suddenly entire organisations may be dropping their entire Microsoft investment.
Microsoft also needs people (in particular, decision makers) to think of them as the top in technology. If you don't introduce new technology those people will start to wonder about alternatives as well. "Will I buy this new Linux thing I have been hearing about so much, or that 8-year old Microsoft OS that is always in the news with reports about security holes? Firefox sure works nice..."
Microsoft needs to keep running, and changing things, because the moment they don't, they will be dead.
Arguably that moment has already come, and what we are seeing right now is just some residual momentum in the carcass...