I have never bought this analog is easier to read quickly or more intuitively than digital argument.
Quite possibly true for a single dial (ie, a watch).
For multiple dials, most people can deal much more easily with a collection of properly designed analog indicators.
The example I recall most clearly was an array of twelve different engine sensor measurements (temp, pressure of different fluids, etc).
The indicators were laid out in a 3x4 grid and the "nominal" operating point for each was with the dial pointing straight to the right.
You could glance at the indicators and answer the question "Is everything operating normally?" even from across the room.
Numeric displays required that you read each value individually.
The consensus on rec.video.satellite.dbs seems to be that weather really doesn't affect image quality (though this may not be true for HD content) but that airplanes, helicopters, birds and people falling off of your roof can and do.
I've heard reports from some friends in areas where it snows in the winter that snow and ice on the dish don't seem to matter, but that when it starts to melt so there's liquid water running over it, the picture quality goes to hell.
No big deal if your dish is mounted where you can walk over and brush the snow off after a storm, but might be a problem if it's mounted up high.
But you are neglecting what many users are looking for when they purchase a new system, they want something that when it comes out of the box does all of the basic functions expected of it... Among them is browse the web, watch movies, write papers, et al. But they most of all don't want to spend their first week downloading software, particularly if they are on a dial up.
This also extends, at least potentially, to developers as well.
The developer of some contemporary application wants to establish network connections, render HTML, play audio or video, etc.
So they expect the platform to provide those services, and want to know that every single instance of the platform has them available.
While I don't necessarily approve, one way to implement such a set of services is as part of the OS.
Other approaches, with X Windows serving as an example, are possible.
Some years back, at least one of my jobs would have been MUCH easier if there had been a standard way to play a chunk of audio on assorted flavors of UNIX.
Two comments on the MS approach:
If they had implemented IE in this fashion -- a low-level HTML-rendering widget and a high-level application that did all the other parts -- they would probably have not gotten into the same legal problems.
But they did the HTML "widget" outside of the OS first, as part of an application, then jammed it into the OS later.
When they did move functionality into the OS, they would have avoided a lot of security headaches if they hadn't moved quite so much.
When the widget starts making its own decisions about what bits to fetch, what checks to make on strings, and so forth, flaws in the widget create security problems in ALL the applications that make use of it.
Looks like the courts in Finland just upheld a legislation barring an employer from reading employee e-mails. Couldn't find an announcement in English, nor are the translation tools too good, so you'll have to take my word for it.
Interesting.
Wonder if this law is consistent with the treatment of e-mail in other parts of their legal system?
For example, in the US, e-mails have the status of written communication and are "discoverable" during lawsuits.
Testimony that you said "Cheat them out of $100M" on the phone is hearsay and not evidence; put the same statement in an e-mail and it's admissible.
Microsoft and other large corporations have found this out the hard way in the past several years.
Given that status, forbidding a company from reading an employee's e-mail (in a company-provided mailbox) would make as much sense as forbidding the company from reading papers written and circulated by the employee.
Applying this logic to the original question, it is possible (though not probable) that emptying a mailbox could put the e-mail provider in the position of having "destroyed evidence."
The provider simply can't know all of the circumstances that might be in play.
Is the client company under a court order to retain written records?
In the US, and I suspect in other countries, those e-mails are company documents and must be handled in accordance with company policies and any legal obligations.
If I am to lead an infantry company (200 men) into combat, I don't arrange a common vote on what we do... You should never forget that business is war and your competitors are your enemies in that war. Survival in that war requires military thinking and military attitude with certain ruthlessness.
Not surprisingly, military organization has probably changed less than almost any other over the last couple thousand years.
I feel quite sure that a modern sargent could adjust fairly easily to leading a similarly-sized group of Roman legionaires.
OTOH, there are certain tasks that businesses need to undertake for which this type of organization is absolutely miserable -- think most forms of research.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, IBM was famous for the regimentation of its sales and support engineers.
Everyone wore a blue suit and white shirt, and did things the "IBM way".
But up at the Watson Research Center, the people creating the next generation of products came to work in shorts and sandals if they felt like it.
IBM "got it" that they needed both types of individuals to be successful.
Of course, they didn't mix the two very often.
"More than half" of the students in you graduate school class being from overseas constitutes an economic and social failure for the United States. The result of bearing the cost of educating foreign competition while denying those college positions to American students can only result in a decline of the ability of the US to compete, at first industrially, and later in the ability to fund the universities that are the privelege of a well funded society.
This is a subject on which otherwise reasonable people can disagree, violently.
I brought that particular point up to suggest that the US, rather than exploiting developing countries by denying them access to education, is and has been willing to share our "resource" with them.
To the best of my knowledge -- of course I'm not part of the admissions process here -- no qualified US students were denied access to this graduate program so that the foreign students could attend.
I'm a non-traditional student, I applied late, and I was accepted.
Of course, I met the math qualifications -- single- and multi-variate calculus, basic differential equations, linear algebra, basic probability and statistics -- which lets out many of the people who might otherwise be interested in a "social science".
The math qualifications are, if anything, understated.
I would suggest that anyone interested in Ph.D. economics include a semester of real analysis and at least one discrete math course as well.
There are some statistics being published these days that suggest that there are more openings for post-secondary students in the US than there are people who want the education.
Not true for the big-name schools, of course, but many smaller schools are having to "compete" for students.
There are a number of reasons for this, and at least one of the big ones might not apply to a student from a developing country.
As the faculty are fond of telling us, investing five or more years of your life to get a Ph.D. is a money-losing proposition in the US.
I have heard of cases over in Physics of people who spend 5-7 years to get the degree, than another 8-10 years bouncing from one low-paid post-doc position to another before finding a faculty position.
In many cases, a student from a developing country who gets the degree here can return home and take a (relative to that local economy) well-paid position immediately.
In any case us western countries have had the lion's share of the distribution of wealth for far too long at the expense of poorer nations. I don't think we have the right to complain if an Indian coder takes our job.
This makes it sound like the western countries got wealthy by plundering everyone else.
In fact, countries become wealthy (increase per-capita income) almost exclusively by growing their own economy.
Why economies grow has been one of THE questions in macroeconomics for a long time.
In the early 1900s, Argentina was as wealthy as either the US or the western European countries.
They have fallen behind, rather than being plundered.
Several factors important to growth have been identified; consider how India or China (or Argentina) has stacked up until recently in these different areas.
Adequate savings.
Countries must invest in the capital infrastructure necessary for production.
It is harder for poor countries to save than for rich ones, but some poor countries have managed.
At the present time, the US is not saving as much as it should to continue growth.
Due to our unique situation -- largest trading partner for many/most other countries, dominant currency in the world -- we may be able to get away with it for a while because the rest of the world will loan us the difference.
Low birth rate.
Other things being equal, a high rate of population growth requires that you save and invest more just to break even.
Historically, it appears that a country that gets basic modern sanitation (separate your sewage from your drinking water supply) experiences a surge in population growth because it requires several generations to realize culturally that they no longer need to have ten kids in order for two to survive to adulthood.
Enhancement of human "capital".
Having a literate, well-trained and trainable workforce matters.
Broad education counts.
The US has been a leader for a long time in making post-secondary education available to the masses.
More than half of the students in my first-year graduate classes at a state university are from overseas.
Institutional factors.
Weak rule of law,
high levels of corruption, and
institutionalized discrimination all act as impediments to economic growth.
Reward entrepeneurs.
In particular, market structure that allows for firms to make some monopoly profits -- allowing innovation to temporarily earn excess returns -- appears to be important.
Could this be the start of an open source Windows version?
Probably not, but it may force MS to separate application code like Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player from the OS itself, and perhaps to stop bundling them for sale.
This type of bundling and integration seems to have been a focus of the EU commission.
I know that the EU can impose fines, but am not sure if they can block MS from selling products in Europe.
If the punishment is an ongoing fine (so many Euros per year until they come into conformance), it would have to be large enough to offset MS's own perceptions of the benefits of integration and bundling.
Is months the shelf life, or the total operating time?
Probably shelf life.
Many of the compounds used in organic circuitry break down fairly quickly in the presence of free oxygen or water vapor.
This has been a problem for OLEDs for video displays, for example.
Until recently, OLED displays had to be made on glass, because all plastics were somewhat permeable to oxygen and water vapor in the air.
There are some new transparent plastics where the polymer chains are close enough together that oxygen atoms can't get through.
The lawyers convinced us that filing the patent is the only way to prevent someone else from filing a patent, covering your technology, and then suing you...
My name is on a number of patents that were filed for precisely this defensive reason.
If the company where I worked held the patents, no one else could obtain one and force us to stop (even temporarily) using my invention for our own internal purposes.
None of the items patented were particularly obvious, and IMHO, a couple were rather innovative.
In one case, a test-and-measurement system, we licensed the source code for the invention rather liberally -- licensees could do anything they wanted except redistribute.
Personally, I would prefer that software could not be patented.
Given that it can be, and you can go be taken to court and lose, companies need to do what is needed to protect themselves.
The article wasn't too detailed on what the patent covered but if they do patent it doesn't that mean that they have to release the full spec for their format? And if that happens then other Word alternatives could be created giving people more alternatives.
Also would it be possible for me to "make" a file reader/convert for my own private use?
Yes, the patent should reveal everything needed for someone "skilled in the art" to reproduce it.
Speaking from limited experience, getting from the patent to a working implementation sometimes requires a very large effort.
For example, a software patent can be obtained without including any code.
In return for revealing the secrets, the patent holder gets a government-granted monopoly on the use of the invention for 20 or so years.
They may choose to allow others to make use of it (eg, license it) but they don't have to.
They may license it to everyone but you, just because they don't like you, and that's legal too.
Building your own implementation violates the patent.
Independently inventing the same thing later, and then using what you think is your own invention without the patent-holder's permission, violates the patent.
Of course, if you build your own implementation strictly for your own use and never, ever tell anyone, you probably won't get caught.
By whom? Where is the data to support your claim? I do not claim it is false, but you must support it with something more than off the cuff statistics. Seriously, where has rigor gone?
How about by Microsoft?
Their annual report splits Windows and Office out from their other product lines.
They file all of the legally-required statements with the SEC.
Given those documents and a bit of work, you can fairly easily derive that the gross margin on Windows and Office is 70-80%.
Gross margin is roughly the revenue taken in minus the direct costs of producing and selling.
IIRC, net margin is closer to 35-40%.
Net margin includes all of the additional costs of running the business -- interest, taxes, HR, legal, etc.
Using gross margin, you get a cost of about $200M for MS to "produce" $1B worth of Windows and Office.
Using net margin, about $600M.
Michael's 99.9% margin might be accurate if you just look at the cost for some CD plant to press the disks and roll them out the door.
MS will be claiming tax deductions for their gift, will probably want to track what countries things go to,
etc,
and will almost certainly spend more than $1M just doing that kind of bookkeeping.
It is a shame that Jpeg2000 hasn't seen wider adoption, as it is visually far superior to Jpeg at similar compression levels, especially in reduced "ringing" around high-frequency edges, and its ability to handle progressive streaming is incredibly useful in interactive environments. In Second Life's case, images as large as 2048x2048 are delivered interactively to the client viewer...
I think you have inadvertently identified why JPEG2000 hasn't seen wider adoption.
It has nice features like progressive refinement, which are important for very large images.
For images that are 800x600 and down, the user gets the full resolution on one screen and has little use for the new capability.
At high compression ratios, say 80:1, JPEG2000 provides better quality than the old standard.
Again, such high compression ratios are important for very large images, less so for small ones.
JPEG2000 usage will increase at the same rate that very large images replace small ones.
The Republics read, and kept on reading, stuff that they really knew that they shouldn't -- the louses.
The documents reveal that the Democrats planned actions such as blocking confirmation hearings until cases their backers (the NAACP is named) felt strongly about were finished -- the louses.
Are there any places left with a government that has some semblence of ethics?
Hearing-protection or not, this arrangement almost certainly violates one more workplace safety regulations at the state or federal level, or both.
Were you threatened with any kind of punishment (eg, firing) if you didn't work under these conditions?
Are you the only person affected?
Did you make any efforts to get your employer to make reasonable accommodations, like temporary relocation of your office?
Since it's only one four-hour block per week, did you offer to work a non-standard schedule instead of working in the office during that time?
If you had a problem with your boss, and it's a company of any size, did you talk to your HR representative?
Larger companies almost always have people in HR who are well aware of work-safety requirements, and whose job is to keep ignorant or asshole supervisors from getting the company crosswise with the law.
I work in TV where commercials pay the freight. Is this so wrong on the net?
TV keeps pushing the limits, but at least realizes that there are limits to how much exposure the user (viewer) will tolerate.
For example, none of the mainstream networks seems willing to go past about 8 minutes of commercial time in a 30-minute show.
They also tend to clump commercials together, so the user gets reasonable-sized blocks of uninterrupted content.
I think at least some Web sites have pushed beyond what reasonable users will tolerate.
Loading the banner ads on a Web page shouldn't be the limiting factor in how quickly the page is displayed.
A user who spends five minutes on an information site visiting a total of six pages shouldn't have to endure eight Flash-driven eye-candy ads.
There are limits.
I look at it this way: If you own an office building, you need to hire people to maintain it (a building manager and some custodians. Occasionally you'll need to contract some electricians or something.) Likewise, if you own some computers, you need to hire some people to maintain them (a sysadmin, and some techs. Occasionally you'll need to contract some programmers [or purchase some shrink-wrapped software]).
This seems like a pretty limited way of thinking about IT within a company.
There are a lot of ways that IT can be deeply involved in creating and improving products and services for the business' customers.
Consider the case where you're the first of the package delivery companies who track packages step-by-step from pick-up to delivery.
That's a customer service, and IT is deeply involved in making it work.
Then the service gets extended so that the customer can check the status over the Web.
Again, IT is deeply involved in making that service work.
It may not be a standalone service, but it is important in making the service that is sold attractive to customers.
These are not jobs done by the equivalent of custodians, sysadmins, and people who replace broken mice.
These are jobs for people who understand how the business works, how technology works, and can design and implement (or oversee the implementation of) a cost-effective solution to a real business problem.
While I am not particularly an advocate of BPL, there have been a number of successful trials in different parts of the world.
IMO (I do technology assessment work professionally from time-to-time), the technology lends itself more to building local access networks than to long-haul transmission.
Also, power network architectures in Europe and South America are better suited to such applications than North American architecture (an issue of the number of households/offices served by each transformer).
Worldwide, power companies have been pushing fiber deeper into their networks for telemetry purposes.
Where it exists, using such fiber for the longer-haul parts of the network makes sense.
IEEE Communications Magazine printed a number of articles in 2003 on this subject.
69 percent of US adults use the Internet. Sounds good, right? Here's the problem... Most of these people probably do not use the Internet for something truly worthwhile.
An interesting point of view, but... so what?
99% of households in the US have a television receiver and access to programming.
Most of those people do not use their television exclusively for something truly worthwhile.
97% of households in the US have telephone service.
Most of those people do not use their telephone exclusively for something truly worthwhile.
A similar percentage of households live within reasonable distance of a public library.
Same "problem".
Everyone has access to USPS service.
Same "problem".
It's a communications medium.
Some people will use it exclusively for worthwhile endeavors, some will use it exclusively for silly things, most will use it for some combination of the two.
There's also the individual perspective to consider -- exchanging silly e-mails with my elderly mother is "worthwhile" to both of us.
Gary's rarely in the same room with most of the reporters he talks with on his morning show, the sports reporter works in another room in the same building, the traffic reporter is somewhere accross town, the weatherperson is from AccuWeather in PA, and any field reporters are of course out in the field.
The content decisions are still being made by editors in Boston... and there's no need to hand pieces of paper to the lead anchor anyway because it's all done on computers anyway. The technology exists to push all of the "data on his desk" to Florida, and for him to send back his voice in high quality...
Now there would have been a story worthy of "News for Nerds".
How do they do a virtual studio distributed over several states?
What do they use for voice transport?
Digital over modems?
What kinds of applications distribute the various "paper" bits to people at remote locations?
Does Gary's screen have reminders so that he knows what the temp is in Boston and doesn't slip up?
Does he have a remote console so he can control equipment that's in Boston?
Are there open source programs to do the job?
Could you do it over the Internet -- talkers in six cities doing a single interactive broadcast?
A list of the transactions taken by SCO's top brass since December is very telling. Sell, sell, sell.
This may be more innocuous than you make it sound.
Only three people sold anything here -- so quite a few more directors and officers DIDN'T sell.
The biggest individual total is something under $500,000 and there's no indication of what he paid for the shares initially or the strike price on the options.
Net, and after taxes, he may be getting a LOT less than the raw sales price indicates.
Finally, there's frequently a bunch of insider sales and purchases right around the end or beginning of the year as a result of tax planning.
BTW: this is a great article, great to show the PHBs that perhaps having a diversity of platforms is better than "standardizing" on one. Standardizing on one platform, be it Windows, Linux, MacOS X or even Amiga, is bad policy and potentially dangerous.
Unfortunately, the PHB will believe, almost instinctively and with some justification from experience with non-IT areas, that the monoculture will have lower operating costs.
They will believe that they will pay less per-seat if they buy a 1000-seat license than if they buy two 500-seat licenses.
They will believe that supporting three different environments will require more staff than supporting a single one.
They will believe that staff who can support more than one environment will command a higher salary than staff who can only deal with one.
They will believe that there will be inconsistencies and incompatibilities between the desktop apps that are used on different platforms, no matter what the vendors say.
This makes it pretty darned clear that IBM does in fact own their own "modifications and derivative works"
I think SCO's case -- the real case, the one that has to be argued in court -- will acknowledge that IBM owns their own work, and that they can do anything they want in terms of embedding it in binary form in their own products, but that IBM requires SCO's permission to reveal the source code or even the methods used to third parties.
That's a fairly fine distinction.
There are lots of situations where you own something, but there are constraints on the uses that you can make of it.
I think SCO will lose, mostly on grounds that (a) most of the SysV "trade secrets" aren't, (b) the previous owners of the contract didn't adequately protect their trade secret rights (so SCO can't successfully attempt to reclaim those rights), and (c) neither party who signed the contract in 1985 intended for it to apply this far into the future.
Interesting that the SCO quote in the InfoWorld story has them saying that they didn't provide any evidence of copyright infringement because it's not a copyright case, it's a contract case.
I've been saying for months (seems like years) that SCO would be better served by Darl just shutting the hell up and letting the lawyers quietly build the contract case.
And the insider stockholders would make far more money by winning the case, have the company declare a one-time dividend to distribute the settlement, and then quietly close up shop, than they would make on any pump-and-dump or licensing schemes.
Most of the real legal analysis that I've seen doesn't make it likely that SCO can prevail, even on contract grounds -- between the amendment to the contract that appears to let IBM off the hook on derivative works, and SCO's fairly tenuous claims on the "trade secrets" involved, it's a long shot.
But the economy prospers as the employees of companies A-F buy plasma TVs, vibrating sheep, and various other gizmos from companies G-L. Right?
In the short term, only if you assume that the funding for companies A-F who are building boosters or whatever is needed for the manned program has somehow sprung into existance without consequences elsewhere in the economy.
Where does the money that government spends on boosters come from?
Increased taxes?
Then everyone has less to spend, and some people will choose to not buy a plasma TV.
Spending cuts in other programs?
Assume it's road construction, then there will be a decrease in employment at company R, who builds roads, that offsets the gain in employment at company B, who builds boosters.
Borrowing?
Then there's less money to loan to companies that want to build a new plasma TV factory, or to consumers who want to purchase a new home, and those industries must shrink in some fashion, or grow less than they might.
For the long term, you can make the claim, and many people do, that money spent on the research end of booster-building will lead to new techniques, new materials, etc, that will make labor and capital more productive and cause the economy to grow.
Why and how economies grow is one of the questions in economics;
claims that booster research is an important factor are open to debate.
NASA can provide you with examples of technology whose development they funded that has non-NASA applications.
It is not clear to me how many of those developments might have occurred anyway, although later in time, without NASA.
A bit of searching on the Web will produce lots of material that attempts to refute the NASA case.
Certainly there seem to be examples where NASA, or at least their supporters, make exaggerated claims.
I have told, on this site, in no uncertain terms, that without Apollo, medical care in the US would still be stuck in the 1950s.
I suggest that that's a silly notion; very few if any of the revolutionary drug treatments developed in the 1980s and 1990s owe anything to Apollo or NASA.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite possibly true for a single dial (ie, a watch). For multiple dials, most people can deal much more easily with a collection of properly designed analog indicators. The example I recall most clearly was an array of twelve different engine sensor measurements (temp, pressure of different fluids, etc). The indicators were laid out in a 3x4 grid and the "nominal" operating point for each was with the dial pointing straight to the right. You could glance at the indicators and answer the question "Is everything operating normally?" even from across the room. Numeric displays required that you read each value individually.
I've heard reports from some friends in areas where it snows in the winter that snow and ice on the dish don't seem to matter, but that when it starts to melt so there's liquid water running over it, the picture quality goes to hell. No big deal if your dish is mounted where you can walk over and brush the snow off after a storm, but might be a problem if it's mounted up high.
This also extends, at least potentially, to developers as well. The developer of some contemporary application wants to establish network connections, render HTML, play audio or video, etc. So they expect the platform to provide those services, and want to know that every single instance of the platform has them available. While I don't necessarily approve, one way to implement such a set of services is as part of the OS. Other approaches, with X Windows serving as an example, are possible. Some years back, at least one of my jobs would have been MUCH easier if there had been a standard way to play a chunk of audio on assorted flavors of UNIX. Two comments on the MS approach:
Interesting. Wonder if this law is consistent with the treatment of e-mail in other parts of their legal system? For example, in the US, e-mails have the status of written communication and are "discoverable" during lawsuits. Testimony that you said "Cheat them out of $100M" on the phone is hearsay and not evidence; put the same statement in an e-mail and it's admissible. Microsoft and other large corporations have found this out the hard way in the past several years. Given that status, forbidding a company from reading an employee's e-mail (in a company-provided mailbox) would make as much sense as forbidding the company from reading papers written and circulated by the employee.
Applying this logic to the original question, it is possible (though not probable) that emptying a mailbox could put the e-mail provider in the position of having "destroyed evidence." The provider simply can't know all of the circumstances that might be in play. Is the client company under a court order to retain written records? In the US, and I suspect in other countries, those e-mails are company documents and must be handled in accordance with company policies and any legal obligations.
Not surprisingly, military organization has probably changed less than almost any other over the last couple thousand years. I feel quite sure that a modern sargent could adjust fairly easily to leading a similarly-sized group of Roman legionaires.
OTOH, there are certain tasks that businesses need to undertake for which this type of organization is absolutely miserable -- think most forms of research. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, IBM was famous for the regimentation of its sales and support engineers. Everyone wore a blue suit and white shirt, and did things the "IBM way". But up at the Watson Research Center, the people creating the next generation of products came to work in shorts and sandals if they felt like it. IBM "got it" that they needed both types of individuals to be successful. Of course, they didn't mix the two very often.
This is a subject on which otherwise reasonable people can disagree, violently.
I brought that particular point up to suggest that the US, rather than exploiting developing countries by denying them access to education, is and has been willing to share our "resource" with them. To the best of my knowledge -- of course I'm not part of the admissions process here -- no qualified US students were denied access to this graduate program so that the foreign students could attend. I'm a non-traditional student, I applied late, and I was accepted. Of course, I met the math qualifications -- single- and multi-variate calculus, basic differential equations, linear algebra, basic probability and statistics -- which lets out many of the people who might otherwise be interested in a "social science". The math qualifications are, if anything, understated. I would suggest that anyone interested in Ph.D. economics include a semester of real analysis and at least one discrete math course as well.
There are some statistics being published these days that suggest that there are more openings for post-secondary students in the US than there are people who want the education. Not true for the big-name schools, of course, but many smaller schools are having to "compete" for students. There are a number of reasons for this, and at least one of the big ones might not apply to a student from a developing country. As the faculty are fond of telling us, investing five or more years of your life to get a Ph.D. is a money-losing proposition in the US. I have heard of cases over in Physics of people who spend 5-7 years to get the degree, than another 8-10 years bouncing from one low-paid post-doc position to another before finding a faculty position. In many cases, a student from a developing country who gets the degree here can return home and take a (relative to that local economy) well-paid position immediately.
This makes it sound like the western countries got wealthy by plundering everyone else. In fact, countries become wealthy (increase per-capita income) almost exclusively by growing their own economy. Why economies grow has been one of THE questions in macroeconomics for a long time. In the early 1900s, Argentina was as wealthy as either the US or the western European countries. They have fallen behind, rather than being plundered. Several factors important to growth have been identified; consider how India or China (or Argentina) has stacked up until recently in these different areas.
Probably not, but it may force MS to separate application code like Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player from the OS itself, and perhaps to stop bundling them for sale. This type of bundling and integration seems to have been a focus of the EU commission. I know that the EU can impose fines, but am not sure if they can block MS from selling products in Europe. If the punishment is an ongoing fine (so many Euros per year until they come into conformance), it would have to be large enough to offset MS's own perceptions of the benefits of integration and bundling.
Probably shelf life. Many of the compounds used in organic circuitry break down fairly quickly in the presence of free oxygen or water vapor. This has been a problem for OLEDs for video displays, for example. Until recently, OLED displays had to be made on glass, because all plastics were somewhat permeable to oxygen and water vapor in the air. There are some new transparent plastics where the polymer chains are close enough together that oxygen atoms can't get through.
My name is on a number of patents that were filed for precisely this defensive reason. If the company where I worked held the patents, no one else could obtain one and force us to stop (even temporarily) using my invention for our own internal purposes. None of the items patented were particularly obvious, and IMHO, a couple were rather innovative. In one case, a test-and-measurement system, we licensed the source code for the invention rather liberally -- licensees could do anything they wanted except redistribute. Personally, I would prefer that software could not be patented. Given that it can be, and you can go be taken to court and lose, companies need to do what is needed to protect themselves.
Yes, the patent should reveal everything needed for someone "skilled in the art" to reproduce it. Speaking from limited experience, getting from the patent to a working implementation sometimes requires a very large effort. For example, a software patent can be obtained without including any code. In return for revealing the secrets, the patent holder gets a government-granted monopoly on the use of the invention for 20 or so years. They may choose to allow others to make use of it (eg, license it) but they don't have to. They may license it to everyone but you, just because they don't like you, and that's legal too. Building your own implementation violates the patent. Independently inventing the same thing later, and then using what you think is your own invention without the patent-holder's permission, violates the patent.
Of course, if you build your own implementation strictly for your own use and never, ever tell anyone, you probably won't get caught.
How about by Microsoft? Their annual report splits Windows and Office out from their other product lines. They file all of the legally-required statements with the SEC. Given those documents and a bit of work, you can fairly easily derive that the gross margin on Windows and Office is 70-80%. Gross margin is roughly the revenue taken in minus the direct costs of producing and selling. IIRC, net margin is closer to 35-40%. Net margin includes all of the additional costs of running the business -- interest, taxes, HR, legal, etc. Using gross margin, you get a cost of about $200M for MS to "produce" $1B worth of Windows and Office. Using net margin, about $600M.
Michael's 99.9% margin might be accurate if you just look at the cost for some CD plant to press the disks and roll them out the door. MS will be claiming tax deductions for their gift, will probably want to track what countries things go to, etc, and will almost certainly spend more than $1M just doing that kind of bookkeeping.
I think you have inadvertently identified why JPEG2000 hasn't seen wider adoption. It has nice features like progressive refinement, which are important for very large images. For images that are 800x600 and down, the user gets the full resolution on one screen and has little use for the new capability. At high compression ratios, say 80:1, JPEG2000 provides better quality than the old standard. Again, such high compression ratios are important for very large images, less so for small ones. JPEG2000 usage will increase at the same rate that very large images replace small ones.
My take-away summary from the article:
Are there any places left with a government that has some semblence of ethics?
I'm assuming this is in the US...
Hearing-protection or not, this arrangement almost certainly violates one more workplace safety regulations at the state or federal level, or both. Were you threatened with any kind of punishment (eg, firing) if you didn't work under these conditions? Are you the only person affected? Did you make any efforts to get your employer to make reasonable accommodations, like temporary relocation of your office? Since it's only one four-hour block per week, did you offer to work a non-standard schedule instead of working in the office during that time? If you had a problem with your boss, and it's a company of any size, did you talk to your HR representative? Larger companies almost always have people in HR who are well aware of work-safety requirements, and whose job is to keep ignorant or asshole supervisors from getting the company crosswise with the law.
TV keeps pushing the limits, but at least realizes that there are limits to how much exposure the user (viewer) will tolerate. For example, none of the mainstream networks seems willing to go past about 8 minutes of commercial time in a 30-minute show. They also tend to clump commercials together, so the user gets reasonable-sized blocks of uninterrupted content. I think at least some Web sites have pushed beyond what reasonable users will tolerate. Loading the banner ads on a Web page shouldn't be the limiting factor in how quickly the page is displayed. A user who spends five minutes on an information site visiting a total of six pages shouldn't have to endure eight Flash-driven eye-candy ads. There are limits.
This seems like a pretty limited way of thinking about IT within a company. There are a lot of ways that IT can be deeply involved in creating and improving products and services for the business' customers. Consider the case where you're the first of the package delivery companies who track packages step-by-step from pick-up to delivery. That's a customer service, and IT is deeply involved in making it work. Then the service gets extended so that the customer can check the status over the Web. Again, IT is deeply involved in making that service work. It may not be a standalone service, but it is important in making the service that is sold attractive to customers. These are not jobs done by the equivalent of custodians, sysadmins, and people who replace broken mice. These are jobs for people who understand how the business works, how technology works, and can design and implement (or oversee the implementation of) a cost-effective solution to a real business problem.
While I am not particularly an advocate of BPL, there have been a number of successful trials in different parts of the world. IMO (I do technology assessment work professionally from time-to-time), the technology lends itself more to building local access networks than to long-haul transmission. Also, power network architectures in Europe and South America are better suited to such applications than North American architecture (an issue of the number of households/offices served by each transformer). Worldwide, power companies have been pushing fiber deeper into their networks for telemetry purposes. Where it exists, using such fiber for the longer-haul parts of the network makes sense. IEEE Communications Magazine printed a number of articles in 2003 on this subject.
An interesting point of view, but... so what? 99% of households in the US have a television receiver and access to programming. Most of those people do not use their television exclusively for something truly worthwhile. 97% of households in the US have telephone service. Most of those people do not use their telephone exclusively for something truly worthwhile. A similar percentage of households live within reasonable distance of a public library. Same "problem". Everyone has access to USPS service. Same "problem".
It's a communications medium. Some people will use it exclusively for worthwhile endeavors, some will use it exclusively for silly things, most will use it for some combination of the two. There's also the individual perspective to consider -- exchanging silly e-mails with my elderly mother is "worthwhile" to both of us.
Now there would have been a story worthy of "News for Nerds". How do they do a virtual studio distributed over several states? What do they use for voice transport? Digital over modems? What kinds of applications distribute the various "paper" bits to people at remote locations? Does Gary's screen have reminders so that he knows what the temp is in Boston and doesn't slip up? Does he have a remote console so he can control equipment that's in Boston? Are there open source programs to do the job? Could you do it over the Internet -- talkers in six cities doing a single interactive broadcast?
Unfortunately, the PHB will believe, almost instinctively and with some justification from experience with non-IT areas, that the monoculture will have lower operating costs. They will believe that they will pay less per-seat if they buy a 1000-seat license than if they buy two 500-seat licenses. They will believe that supporting three different environments will require more staff than supporting a single one. They will believe that staff who can support more than one environment will command a higher salary than staff who can only deal with one. They will believe that there will be inconsistencies and incompatibilities between the desktop apps that are used on different platforms, no matter what the vendors say.
I think SCO's case -- the real case, the one that has to be argued in court -- will acknowledge that IBM owns their own work, and that they can do anything they want in terms of embedding it in binary form in their own products, but that IBM requires SCO's permission to reveal the source code or even the methods used to third parties. That's a fairly fine distinction. There are lots of situations where you own something, but there are constraints on the uses that you can make of it. I think SCO will lose, mostly on grounds that (a) most of the SysV "trade secrets" aren't, (b) the previous owners of the contract didn't adequately protect their trade secret rights (so SCO can't successfully attempt to reclaim those rights), and (c) neither party who signed the contract in 1985 intended for it to apply this far into the future.
Interesting that the SCO quote in the InfoWorld story has them saying that they didn't provide any evidence of copyright infringement because it's not a copyright case, it's a contract case. I've been saying for months (seems like years) that SCO would be better served by Darl just shutting the hell up and letting the lawyers quietly build the contract case. And the insider stockholders would make far more money by winning the case, have the company declare a one-time dividend to distribute the settlement, and then quietly close up shop, than they would make on any pump-and-dump or licensing schemes. Most of the real legal analysis that I've seen doesn't make it likely that SCO can prevail, even on contract grounds -- between the amendment to the contract that appears to let IBM off the hook on derivative works, and SCO's fairly tenuous claims on the "trade secrets" involved, it's a long shot.
In the short term, only if you assume that the funding for companies A-F who are building boosters or whatever is needed for the manned program has somehow sprung into existance without consequences elsewhere in the economy. Where does the money that government spends on boosters come from? Increased taxes? Then everyone has less to spend, and some people will choose to not buy a plasma TV. Spending cuts in other programs? Assume it's road construction, then there will be a decrease in employment at company R, who builds roads, that offsets the gain in employment at company B, who builds boosters. Borrowing? Then there's less money to loan to companies that want to build a new plasma TV factory, or to consumers who want to purchase a new home, and those industries must shrink in some fashion, or grow less than they might.
For the long term, you can make the claim, and many people do, that money spent on the research end of booster-building will lead to new techniques, new materials, etc, that will make labor and capital more productive and cause the economy to grow. Why and how economies grow is one of the questions in economics; claims that booster research is an important factor are open to debate. NASA can provide you with examples of technology whose development they funded that has non-NASA applications. It is not clear to me how many of those developments might have occurred anyway, although later in time, without NASA. A bit of searching on the Web will produce lots of material that attempts to refute the NASA case. Certainly there seem to be examples where NASA, or at least their supporters, make exaggerated claims.
I have told, on this site, in no uncertain terms, that without Apollo, medical care in the US would still be stuck in the 1950s. I suggest that that's a silly notion; very few if any of the revolutionary drug treatments developed in the 1980s and 1990s owe anything to Apollo or NASA.